Table Of ContentKantian Commitments
Kantian Commitments
Essays on Moral Theory and Practice
BARBARA HERMAN
1
1
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Contents
Preface vii
Abbreviations of Kant’s Works xiii
Notes on Original Publication xv
PART ONE: RETHINKING KANT’S ETHICS
1. Reasoning to Obligation 3
2. The Difference That Ends Make 21
3. Making Exceptions 42
4. A Mismatch of Methods 58
5. Kantian Commitments 84
PART TWO: EXTENDING THE BOUNDARIES
6. A Habitat for Humanity 103
7. Morality Unbounded 125
8. We Are Not Alone: A Place for Animals in Kant’s Ethics 157
9. Other to Self: Finding Love on the Path to Moral Agency 175
10. Religion and the Highest Good: Speaking to the Heart of
Even the Best of Us 193
References 211
Index 213
Preface
The ten essays collected here represent a series of efforts to rethink many of
the things I took myself to know about Kant’s ethics. Some look again at core
Kantian arguments; some offer readings of less investigated parts of Kant’s
writing; some try to fill out what a Kantian theory should look like in terms
that respond to demands of contemporary moral theory. All connect with a
familiar set of issues in Kant interpretation: what counts as moral reasoning,
the status of human persons as moral agents, how the facts of our being
socially embedded and materially embodied shape our duties. You might
assume these issues were largely settled by now. Perhaps there are remaining
puzzles in the application of the famous categorical imperative procedure, but
we know how it’s supposed to go and certainly what it’s for. And perhaps there
are difficulties in getting the original Kantian ideas to apply to the more social
parts of moral theory, but recent Kant-i nspired contractualisms have extended
the theory’s ability to reach beyond the ethics of individuals. And so on. But I
have come to doubt that significant arguments I and others developed con-
nect in the right way to core Kantian commitments, and it is my growing con-
viction that I should be unsettled in what I have taken myself to know that is
the origin of these essays.
The unsettling began in a seminar on Kant’s ethics that included graduate
students who had worked with me for several years, as well as first- and
second- year students who were relatively new to the material. In thinking
how to proceed in a way that would be useful to both groups I decided to try
to present the Groundwork intuitively, as a straightforward way of thinking
about morality, while keeping an eye on the text. The result was the argument
of “Reasoning to Obligation” (Chapter 1). If morality belonged to practical
reason and practical reason was (because it had to be) about reasoning, then
we should be able to find analogs to formal standards of good reasoning—
validity and soundness—on the practical side. And we could, looking at
Kant’s examples, see that what he was arguing was that there were limits to
what could be reasoned to from self-i nterest, using contradiction-u nder-
universalization as a validity test. As the essay aims to show, this shift in focus
not only opens interpretive doors, it also resolves a number of old problems
about the categorical imperative tests and moral worth. It also set up a new
viii Preface
way to think about the status of persons as ends-i n- themselves, thinking now
of ends as premises for reasoning and taking the next natural step of regard-
ing a reasoner as a final end (not an end- for- something). As argued in “The
Difference That Ends Make” (Chapter 2), this insight unravels some of the
more recalcitrant textual puzzles surrounding the argument for the formula
of humanity and also shows the connection between that formula and the
more fundamental formula of universal law.
To fill out a “good reasoning” story requires that there be true premises.
These are found in the Metaphysics of Morals’ obligatory ends. The result is a
more resilient and flexible Kantian account of moral value and deliberative
requirement, one that is surprisingly sensitive to the complexities of ordinary
human living. “Making Exceptions” (Chapter 3) explores the interesting
consequences of this for Kant’s supposed rigorism. In the two following
essays, “A Mismatch of Methods” and “Kantian Commitments” (Chapters 4
and 5), the “good reasoning” account is tested against competitor hybrid and
contractualist theories that take themselves (mistakenly, I argue) to be
preserving the best of Kant’s insights while adding resources that can manage
hard cases that Kant gets wrong.
While I am confident the arguments of these essays make real advances in
our understanding of Kant’s theory, I am quite sure that they are not the last
word on their topics, not even my last word. I do not find such a state of affairs
troubling: it has been my experience with these texts that they reveal them-
selves slowly and in stages. There is of course their sheer difficulty. And then
there is the need to peel away assumptions we bring to the texts that introduce
questions they were not meant to answer, and assumptions that rule out con-
cepts and ideas central to the moral project as Kant sees it, sometimes block-
ing appreciation of its ambition and scale. So I anticipate still other rounds of
becoming unsettled and rethinking and reassembling the pieces.1
The second half of the collection takes on some new projects. The first bits
of Kant I worked on seriously, as a graduate student, were his historical essays,
especially his curious remarks about how we should resolve the under-
determination of historical narrative in a morally progressive way. The barrier
to understanding these remarks was obvious. How could Kant, who denies a
role to empirical content in the foundation of morals, think there was a need
to adopt a progressive historical narrative? Or that genuine moral progress
1 It is thus no surprise that I now see the essays in Part One as stages on the way to the view of
Kant’s ethics I argue for in The Moral Habitat (2021). The essays are, however, independent of that
study, making their own arguments in response to distinct challenges to, and criticisms of, the Kantian
project.
Preface ix
occurs independent of the agency of good persons? Since Kant wrote the his-
torical essays in the same years as his major ethical works, the interpretive
problem could hardly be ignored. Indeed, it was on my mind for more than
thirty years, a continuing background source of many of the questions
responsible for my going back to rethink basic ideas about Kant’s views of
agency and moral action. At long last, and at the urging of Amélie Rorty,
I wrote “A Habitat for Humanity” (Chapter 6), a partial reading of Kant’s
wonderful “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” Taking
that essay seriously, morally and philosophically, was instructive in gaining
insight into Kant’s larger moral scheme (larger, that is, than the foundation
arguments that are the concern of the Groundwork and Critique of Practical
Reason). It also helped settle the question whether Kant’s moral system was
constructed with an eye to accommodating the actual circumstances of per-
sons, as well as offering an idea of how they might be changed for the better
by self- consciously moral agents acting together.
Embedding the moral project in a political setting—as “The Idea for a
Universal History” does, and, when you think about it, as does the
Metaphysics of Morals—raised the question whether and how anything like
the morality-fi rst Kantian account could accommodate the various pluralisms
that currently concern us. “Morality Unbounded” (Chapter 7) takes up this
challenge in Kant- informed if not Kant- specific terms. That these questions
are not at all alien to Kant is evident in his complex negotiation with the
claims of religion.
The last three essays take up topics that are often seen as impediments to
working out a Kantian ethics within the framework he offers. They concern
the moral status of animals, how we are to think naturalistically about moral
development, and Kant’s idea of the highest good. I don’t think it’s a necessary
aspiration to make good on every one of Kant’s texts and arguments; we are
free to move beyond Kant’s limitations, and should do so where he gets things
wrong, or simply can’t see beyond his personal or historical horizon. However,
one of the lessons of my “unsettling project” is that there is a risk in premature
abandonment, and considerable value to be had from engaging with hard
texts as imaginatively as one can.
In that spirit, “We Are Not Alone” (Chapter 8) takes on Kant’s difficult idea
that our duties to animals, though real, are indirect—“duties with respect to”
and not “duties to”—and tries to make sense of why he might think not having
such duties would “uproot a natural disposition” that morality needs. The
interesting puzzle is not why being cruel to animals might lead us to be cruel
more generally, but why not having a duty to animals would change our nature.
