Johan Brännmark

Morality and the

Pursuit of Happiness A Study in Kantian Ethics

Department of Philosophy Lund University

Lund 2002

© Johan Brännmark ISBN 91-628-5235-3 Printed by Media-Tryck, Lund University Lund 2002

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Table of Contents

1. Ethics and the Metaphysics of the Person 1

1.1 The History and Task of Moral Philosophy 2 1.2 The Idea of Reflective Equilibrium 7 1.3 Metaphysics: Revisionary vs. Descriptive 11

1.4 Descriptive Metaphysics and the Pythagoras Story 15

1.5 An Outline of the Argument 19

2. The Value of the Good Will 22

2.1 The Good Will and Human Dignity 23

2.2 Moore and the Idea of ‘Intrinsic Value’ 28

2.3 Organic Unities and Moral Goodness 35

2.4 The Disunity of ‘Good’ 39

2.5 Two Distinctions in Moral Theory 47

2.6 Kant and the Highest Good 51

3. Values and the Fabric of the World 58

3.1 Moorean Objectivism and the Naturalist Challenge 59

3.2 Quasi-Moorean Projectivism 64

3.3 Normativity, Sociality, and Reflexivity 70

3.4 Kant and the Problem of Freedom 75

3.5 The Teleological Conception of Freedom 79

3.6 Regarding Others under the Idea of Freedom 84

3.7 Social Constructivism 90

3.8 Truth and Progress 95

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4. Persons and the Space of Reasons 99

4.1 Motivation and Normativity 99

4.2 The Humean Theory of Motivation 105

4.3 Reason and Deliberation 108

4.4 Explanation, Rationalization, and Justification 113

4.5 Brutes and Persons 119

4.6 The Dualism of Practical Reason 127

5. The Ideal of Happiness 135

5.1 Standard Positions and Standard Problems 136

5.2 Happiness: Subjectivism vs. Objectivism 143

5.3 Towards a Kantian Account of Happiness 149

5.4 The Role of Happiness in Deliberation 157

5.5 Why be Moral? 161

6. Morality as a Limiting Condition 167

6.1 Consequentialism: Impartiality as Impersonality 168

6.2 Reasoning and Immanent Detachment 176

6.3 Impartiality as Universalizability 181

6.4 Principles and Judgments 188

6.5 Leading a Moral Life 198

6.6 Virtue and the Highest Good 208

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Acknowledgments

Paul Valéry says somewhere: A poem is never finished, it is abandoned in despair. The same can be said of some works of philosophy. I have more than once, when I have finished a book and finally sent it off to the publisher, had the feeling: ‘If only I could rewrite it from the beginning, now that I know how it should be done!’ – John Searle, Rationality in Action, i

I suppose that the time to let go of a work has come when you reach the point where you feel that were you to rewrite it, you would not end up with a new version of the same book, but with a new book. As for the piece I actually ended up with, there are many people who have been invaluable in making it possible. To begin with, the two persons who have been my supervisors: Ingmar Persson, who first encouraged me to set out to write a Ph. D. thesis in philosophy, and Wlodek Rabinowicz, who encouraged me to write about Kantian ethics and who oversaw my writing of this particular work. I have learnt so much philosophically from both of them and not just on matters having to do with my thesis. Also, Wlodek’s detailed and perceptive comments on every part of my manuscript were a tremendous help in laboring to prune the text into its final shape. I am also very much indebted to the participants at the Higher Seminar in Practical Philosophy at Lund University; not only have they patiently read and commented on most of this thesis, they have also read and commented on a number of preliminary papers where many of the ideas elaborated in this work were first tried out: Dan Egonsson, Jeanette Emt, Birgitta Forsman, Ylva von Gerber, Lena Halldenius, Victoria Höög, Magnus Jiborn, Mats Johansson, Jonas Josefsson, Kutte Jönsson, Andreas Lindh, Jonas Olson, Erik Persson, Björn Petersson, Ingrid Petersson, Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Caj Strandberg, Daniel Svensson, and certainly a number of other occasional participants. Finally, I must thank my family for their great love, care, and encouragement. Their unwavering belief in me and my ability to finish this work has been a constant source of support, especially at those times when I was perhaps not as sure about this ability as I might appeared to have been. Lund J.B. April 2002

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Note on References to Kant’s Works

All references to Kant are given parenthically in the text. The page numbers cited are those in the Academy Edition, Kants gesammelte Schriften 1900-), except for citations from the Critique of Pure Reason, where the page numbers given are those of its first (A) and second (B) editions, and the Lectures on Ethics and the Religion which are simply cited by the page number of the translations. Given below are the abbreviations I have used in my references and the English translations from which I have quoted. G Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. H. J. Paton. London:

Hutchinson, 1956. CPR Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London:

Macmillan, 1928. CPrR Critique of Practical Reason (1788), trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis:

Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. CJ Critique of Judgement (1790), trans J. C. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1952. MM Metaphysics of Morals (1797), trans. Mary Gregor, in The Cambridge Edition of

the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

R Religions within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), trans. Theodore M. Green and Hoyt H. Hudson. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1934.

TP ‘On the Common Saying: “That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in Practice’” (1793), trans. Mary Gregor, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

LE Lectures on Ethics (1775-1780), compiled for publication by Paul Menzer in 1924, trans. Louis Infield. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

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1. Ethics and the Metaphysics of the Person

A critic who wished to say something against [the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals] really did better than he intended when he said that there was no new principle of morality in it but only a new formula. Who would want to introduce a new principle of morality and, as it were, be its inventor, as if the world had hitherto been ignorant of what duty is or had been thoroughly wrong about it? – Critique of Practical Reason, 8n

Considering the bold statements Kant makes in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, about how his critical philosophy constitutes a Copernican revolution within the field of theoretical philosophy, his modesty about what he accomplishes in his practical philosophy is striking. Quite a few of Kant’s readers would probably take a different view, sensing that the Categorical Imperative, in spite of some superficial similarities with the Golden Rule,1 is a radically distinct principle the application of which might in many cases yield results that lie far beyond the bounds of common sense. Given that much of modern moral philosophy has been devoted to finding a criterion of the moral rightness of actions, it is perhaps not surprising if many have read Kant as above all attempting to deliver a moral algorithm for us to use. Yet, he seems to deny that this is what he is doing, since he apparently thinks that we already know where our duty lies. So what is he doing? In order to say something about this we will first have to say something about the direction from which he approaches his subject matter. Once we have done this, we will hopefully be in a better position to understand the kind of project that Kantian ethics is essentially about and also see what kind of methodological approach is best fitted to carry it out. This is what I attempt to do in this chapter and with these pieces in place I will, in the remainder of this work, turn to elaborating a Kantian conception of morality and defend it against some other influential conceptions. The key tenet defended in this chapter is that in the argument over which conception of morality that is the superior one, attention must be paid to the underlying theories of the person that too often lie 1 In his discussion of the Formula of Humanity Kant compares his version of the supreme moral principle with the negative formulation of the Golden Rule and makes it clear that he does not regard them as being different formulations of the same principle (G 430n).

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merely implicit in most of the major ethical theories. It is a strength of Kant’s moral philosophy that it takes this matter seriously and, at the end of the day, I hope that this work will, if not convince the reader of the superiority of Kantianism, at least make a good case for the importance of the nature of the person for ethical theory.

1.1 The History and Task of Moral Philosophy

In a recent work on the philosophical background to Kant’s moral theorizing, Jerome Schneewind distinguishes between two ways to approach the history of moral philosophy, and thus two ways in which philosophers might understand themselves as links in the chain of thinkers stretching back towards Socrates and perhaps even further.2 According to what Schneewind calls the Socrates story moral philosophy has, since the day that Socrates put his question about how we ought to live, been in search of the basic ethical truths, i.e. on this story there is some discovery to be made and it is the task of philosophers to make it. In bright contrast to Kant’s remarks in the introduction to the second Critique, one might put Schopenhauer’s lament in the introduction to his prize-essay On the Basis of Morality:

Naturally it is disheartening to reflect that ethics, this science directly affecting life, has come off no better than has abstruse metaphysics, and that though it has been pursued continually since Socrates founded it, it still seeks its first principle.3

If we share Schopenhauer’s belief in there being some substantial discovery left to be made in ethical theory we must also, to some extent, see the history of moral philosophy as a history of failures, indeed, as an extraordinarily long history of failures (matched only by a few other philosophical disciplines). Given such an outlook it is perhaps also easy to become pessimistic about its prospects unless one, like Derek Parfit, can find some suitable scapegoat for this long series of failures:

Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.4

2 The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 534-8. 3 On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995), p. 46. 4 Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 454.

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Although they differ in tone, what is expressed by both Schopenhauer and Parfit is still the idea that there is some real progress left to be made within moral philosophy and that, accordingly, moral practice still awaits this discovery. Given the importance of ethical matters in our lives, this view thus sets a formidable task for moral philosophy. Schneewind contrasts this position with an opposing view, what he calls the Pythagoras story,5 according to which the basic ethical truths have been known, although perhaps not always satisfactorily explicated, for as long as human beings have been living together. As Schneewind puts it, ‘[i]n the Pythagoras story the point of sound moral philosophy is to combat the sinful efforts made by some wicked philosophers to cloud our grasp of morality.’6 Now, while Kant was certainly very respectful towards his fellow philosophers, even towards those with whom he disagreed (a trait certainly not shared by Schopenhauer), it is also quite clear that he sees most moral philosophers as fundamentally mistaken about the nature of morality, the usual failure being that they do not keep morality pure and thus end up in different forms of eudaimonism. Corresponding to Schneewind’s distinction between two views on the history and task of moral philosophy there is also a distinction between two ways of seeing what the main difficulty in the moral life of an agent is. On the one view, the main difficulty is to find out what it is that is right and wrong, i.e. the chief problem with which we tend to wrestle is a deliberative one. On the other view, the main difficulty is to actually do the things that we already know are right and wrong, i.e. the chief problem with which we tend to wrestle is a motivational one. Any reasonable person will of course realize that we face both problems, but there remains a question of which is the primary one and on that point we can surely disagree. Kant’s position on this matter is clear: he is an adherent of the

5 The reason why Schneewind calls the latter view the Pythagoras story is that in the 17th century there was a discussion about whether Pythagoras had been Jewish; what was at stake in this discussion was whether Greek philosophical thought was to be seen as original or whether, through Pythagoras, it had been infused with Hebrew thinking, in which case even the wisdom of the Greeks could be understood as ultimately emanating from God. Of course, for present purposes, this particular question is of no interest; what is important is the tension between a ‘Socratic’ approach that proceeds as if there are some basic truths to be discovered and the ‘Pythagorean’ approach that proceeds as if there is some common unity which might perhaps be explicated, but which can never deserve to be thought of as any form of real discovery. Both approaches seem to rest on something like pieces of methodological faith: in the first case, faith that there is something there in the subject matter of ethics that remains to be discovered; in the second, faith that there is already in ordinary morality a common core of wisdom that constitutes all that there is to know of importance on the subject matter of ethics. 6 Ibid., p. 546.

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second view. It is a view that quite naturally falls in line with the Pythagoras story; if we already know what is right and wrong (and in those cases where we are uncertain or in disagreement, philosophical investigation will not yield any resolutions anyway), there remains little of a strictly philosophical nature left for the moral philosopher but to combat those philosophers who adhere to the Socrates story, a struggle which can be conducted both by trying to point out flaws in their theories and by trying to conceptualize common sense morality in a way that shows its basic soundness. And it is here we find the answer to the question of what Kant is doing. In accordance with the above, the standpoint on which the present work builds is that on substantive ethical matters Kantianism does not provide us with anything new. Rather it presents us with a way of rationalizing a certain understanding of the relation between morality and the pursuit of happiness, namely of morality as constituting a limiting condition on our respective pursuits of personal happiness. While Kantian ethics, at least as I read it, is quite compatible with there being different norms in place at different times and in different societies, there remains this structural feature that is imbued in common sense and not just in the common sense of a certain point of space and time, but of common sense in a broader meaning, a human one. Of course, we all know that what is called common sense is something the exact contents of which fluctuate over the centuries and our common sense is not the common sense of 18th century Prussia. But this variance does not necessarily rule out the possibility that there is a certain thread running through what can reasonably be called common sense morality, although it does certainly indicate that if there is such a thread then it cannot but be a highly general one and therefore probably best understood as a set of structural features rather than some set of concrete precepts. When Kant says that he does not present a new principle but only a new formula, one might perhaps wonder what the original formula is, but such a question would be futile since there is in this context no position from which anyone has spoken, or will speak, in a way that can be taken as constituting the original formulation with respect to which other phrasings are mere reformulations. Yet, even if there is no original formulation that we can articulate, we might still devise different formulas that we can reasonably understand as expressions of the same general idea. One formula that I would say falls quite well in line with what Kant is after is the principle live and let live. In this case, it is more evident than with Kant’s principle that it is not a formula from which we are to derive highly specific precepts, but rather a principle that seeks to capture something like the spirit of morality. What both it and Kant’s principle are rooted in is a picture of human beings as leading their lives beside

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each other: we lead our lives in a shared social space and by the tracing of our paths through this shared space we can block some paths for others or open up new ones that would otherwise not have been available. What the principle of ‘live and let live’ involves is a certain kind of recognition, one of mutuality, of the fact that we are fellow occupants of this social space, that you as well as I both pursue happiness and that our pursuits are, in an important sense, of equal standing. On the reading of Kant given here, his ethical project is accordingly best described as explicating such a stance that we can, and should, take towards our fellow occupants in the shared social space within which we lead our lives. What this means is that the Kantian approach is centered round the agent’s metaphysical conception of herself, or perhaps what an appropriate form of such a conception would look like. Thus, it is a theory that largely falls within the field of inquiry that Thomas Nagel has called ‘metaphysics of the person.’7 For Kant, and for any other thinker whose approach is similar to his, ethical inquiry is not an inquiry about the world; it is an inquiry about us, especially about that part of us that might be called practical reason. It is about what it means to be a person and what it means to act on reasons. The fact that it is the metaphysics of the person that forms the core of the Kantian approach to ethics does however not mean that it is something that we can delve exclusively into. Rather, if we look at the argumentative structure of a work like the Groundwork, we can see that Kant starts by trying to sort out the key features of commonsensical moral knowledge and then turns to constructing a metaphysics of the person that will provide an underpinning for this picture. Accordingly, there are two principal parts of Kant’s ethical theory: (i) a general ontology of values and norms, and (ii) a metaphysics of the person. For the Kantian project in moral philosophy to be successful, i.e. in order for it to provide an underpinning of common sense that rationalizes its general features, it needs to deliver these two components in a way that captures the essential features of how we understand them commonsensically and do so in a way that fits together as a whole. The philosophical heart of the project clearly lies in the second part, the metaphysics of the person. I would say that this is only as it should be, but given that many moral philosophers aim primarily at delivering a general ontology of values and norms it might perhaps be questioned whether it really is. Should ethical enquiry not rather start with establishing which things have value? After all, ethics deals with a practical subject matter and in order to be able to reason well about what we should do we need to know what has value. But the point here is not so much about where we should start our inquiry or what part of an ethical theory that can be of most use to us, the point is rather about what it is

7 The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 58

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that forms the philosophical core of an ethical theory and, indeed, no ethical theory can do without a theory of the person. If it appears to do so, it is just because such a theory is simply silently presupposed. The reason for this necessity is easy to identify: ethical ideals are supposed to either have or to be able to get a grip on us. This is why every theory about ethical matters will, if it is to make sense, have to rely at least on an implicit theory about the way we are as persons. Of course, different ethical theories might present us with different conceptions of the person, or at least imply such conceptions, but it is still a part of ethical thought that cannot be truly circumvented, even though it can most definitely be overlooked in the sense that one can go on philosophizing about ethical matters as if there were no need to go into such things. For the adherent of the ‘Pythagorean’ project an investigation into the metaphysics of the person becomes a natural way to explicate why it is that there are no great secrets to be uncovered in laying out a general ontology of values and norms. After all, it seems quite reasonable that since we as human beings have lived together for such a long time we should all have a fairly good grasp of the metaphysics of the person, not perhaps a philosophical grasp, but the kind of lived understanding that philosophical inquiry will have to track if it is to yield insight into the matter. On the other hand, for those who wish to challenge common sense morality, the metaphysics of the person will, at least potentially, yield the kind of Archimedean point from which such a challenge can be forcefully made. Philosophers like the aforementioned Schopenhauer and Parfit, who both challenge common sense morality, anchor their challenges in radical theories about the person. If it can be shown that our lived understanding of what it means to be a person is after all fundamentally mistaken, then challenges to common sense morality can make sense in a way that they can never do if they just rely on appeals to isolated intuitions. Still, I suspect that there is some resistance to the idea that ethical theorizing need go into metaphysical matters. To some extent, this resistance might simply be due to the fact that such a requirement would make life more difficult for the moral philosopher. But perhaps it also has to do with the fact that although metaphysics has to some extent been rehabilitated over the last few decades, it is still a subject often looked upon with suspicion and philosophers tend not to describe what they are doing as metaphysical even when it is the most appropriate label. Thus, it is only natural that those who are skeptical towards metaphysics in general might wonder if one really must go into matters like the metaphysics of the person at all. I will now turn to consider a methodological approach that in some eyes might hold out the promise of not having to go into such matters, but which in the final analysis leads precisely in that direction.

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1.2 The Idea of Reflective Equilibrium

Looking at the turn towards normative ethics, which might be dated to the early 1970s, the overall tendency within this turn was towards a narrow rather than a broad approach to ethical matters. This can be most clearly seen in the growth of the field that is often called ‘applied ethics,’ an epithet that is somewhat of a misnomer since it suggests that one had something to apply, when the case was usually rather that one simply looked at some isolated moral issue, such as abortion, euthanasia, world hunger, or issues concerning the treatment of animals, and then utilized a battery of more or less outlandish thought experiments to test our intuitive responses and to move the reader in a certain direction.8 If there was a key methodological idea at work here, it was that we could make progress in our thinking about these concrete moral questions by striving towards greater consistency: we take our intuitive moral responses as working material and then try to prune them into better shape by subjecting them to a battery of thought experiments.9 Although primarily a political philosopher, the person who most influentially explicated a way of approaching normative matters that allowed such a great role to be played by our intuitions was probably John Rawls. Instead of just implicitly relying on an ideal of consistency, Rawls laid out his ideas about ethical inquiry as striving towards what he called ‘reflective equilibrium.’10 What this means is that we are to gradually bring our considered judgments, i.e. our most trusted intuitions, and our principles to cohere with each other. As a philosophical ideal, coherence is of course nothing new and the Rawlsian contribution is primarily that he presented a view about what it is that is to cohere. A supposed consequence of this methodological approach was what Rawls called ‘the

8 Some of the more well-known of these works are Judith Jarvis Thompson’s ‘A Defense of Abortion’ in Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1971) and Peter Singer’s ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ in Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1972). 9 Shelly Kagan has called the technique employed in many of these works ‘contrast arguments’, see ‘The Additive Fallacy’ in Ethics 99 (1988). The technique is this: There is some feature that is present in the kind of cases that one is interested in, a feature that one finds either irrelevant or relevant. One then devises an example of a different kind in which this feature can be clearly seen to be relevant or irrelevant, and then contends that since the feature has this status in the clear case it must also have it in the original category of cases, it is just that we failed to notice it. While this technique might certainly be useful in getting us to look at matters with new eyes, it does not prove anything about the relevance of the feature in the original kind of cases and to think otherwise is precisely to commit what Kagan calls ‘the additive fallacy’. 10 A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 48-53. Rawls’ view is that this is really the traditional approach from Aristotle down through Sidgwick, although he recognizes that there are ‘elements of epistemological intuitionism’ in Sidgwick (p. 51).

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independence of moral theory.’11 Rawls’ contention takes its cue from the obvious fact that philosophy consists of a number of different disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, ethics, political philosophy, and so on. This is naturally a situation that can be understood in a number of different ways and the relation between these disciplines is a matter that has a profound impact on what philosophical inquiry must be like in order to make sense. One way of understanding this situation is that these different disciplines are dependent on each other, an idea that can obviously be more or less strongly phrased. The strongest possible would be that one could not delve into any philosophical discipline without having to delve into them all: either philosophy is oriented towards complete systems or it is not meaningful philosophy at all. Another quite strong position is that there are some of these disciplines that are fundamental and that must be adequately dealt with first, before we can say anything meaningful at all in the other disciplines. As a global thesis about philosophy, the first position is probably too strong to take seriously, but one can certainly take seriously the idea that a meaningful investigation into ethics necessarily presupposes at least some results in other philosophical fields. As for this second position, one example would be Elizabeth Anscombe’s suggestion that we must postpone serious moral philosophy until the day that we possess an adequate philosophy of psychology.12 I would say that the main problem with this position is that it is difficult to see how we could possibly arrive at a satisfactory philosophy of psychology without having a fairly good picture of the nature of morality since morality is far too much implicated in matters of action, desire, the will, intention, and so on, for it to be possible to neatly separate these two philosophical fields except perhaps for some fairly crude textbook purposes. I take it that similar problems would probably mar any other effort to separate out some issues that are to be resolved before we enter into ethical matters. Rawls’ assertion of the independence of moral theory does of course run counter to both of the views above and is naturally connected to his ideas about methodology: since he sees little alternative to the procedure of striving towards a reflective equilibrium, then that is what we will have to do if we are to do moral theory at all. And if it is that which we are to do, then we have our material already at hand: if we reflect we will come up with both a set of considered particular judgments and a few alternative sets of principles that can be seen as

11 In his aptly titled 1974 APA Address ‘The Independence of Moral Theory’, reprinted in his Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 12 ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. III: Ethics, Religion, and Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 38.

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reasonable contenders for providing a counterpart to our considered judgments. Accordingly, we do not have to stop doing moral theory until the results are in from such philosophical fields as epistemology, the theory of meaning, or the philosophy of mind.13 If Rawls is right in this, it would also seem that we could do without going into such matters as the metaphysics of the person, something which would certainly be neat since it is probably the area that more than anything else constitutes a nexus where a plethora of philosophical issues in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of language all run together and create a tangled web of philosophical difficulties. However, while Rawls’ attempt at freeing moral philosophy from being bogged down with a host of complex and philosophically far-reaching issues is certainly understandable, it is more doubtful whether it is feasible. In fact, one of the main criticisms that were directed against Rawls’ political philosophy was that he actually presupposed a very specific metaphysics of the person, and an implausible one at that. Indeed, the major issue in the so-called liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s was not so much concerned with any specific questions of policy, but rather precisely with the metaphysics of the person. Whether the kind of metaphysics of the person that was claimed to underlie Enlightenment liberalism was that of an ‘unencumbered self,’14 an ‘emotivist,’15 or an ‘atomist’16 one, the general idea was still that liberals like Rawls simply presupposed rather than argued for the universality of their underlying conception of the person. Given that ethics and political philosophy are similar in many ways, and indeed even overlapping in some, it seems reasonable to assume that the same line of criticism is valid with respect to the kind of moral philosophy discussed above. Rawls’ own response to this was what might be seen as a retreat, but is perhaps best seen as an explication of what his project had been about all along. When he states his commitment to formulating a vision of liberalism that is ‘political, not metaphysical’17 one might perhaps be led to believe that he has modified his position so that he no longer relies on any metaphysics of the person at all, but this is not the case. Rather, the difference is not that he no

13 The three fields considered in more depth by Rawls in ‘The Independence of Moral Theory.’ 14 Michael Sandel, ‘The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self’ in Political Theory 12 (1984), but also Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd Ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 15 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd Ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), Chapter 3. 16 Charles Taylor, ‘Atomism’ in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 17 ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’ in Collected Papers.

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longer has a metaphysics of the person but that he now fully acknowledges that he cannot do without one. What makes Rawls reluctant to nevertheless speak of his theory as metaphysical is that he makes no claim to universality with respect to his underlying vision of the self or, for that matter, the more concrete political conclusions he reaches. His present theory is therefore to be regarded more as an explication of Western liberalism than an argument for it. This does not mean that Rawls has abandoned the reflective equilibrium approach, rather he has moved towards an approach that strives towards wide reflective equilibrium. As outlined by Norman Daniels, such an approach does not simply attempt a fit between judgments and principles, but also with the relevant background theories.18 If we assume that these do not simply consist in reformulated versions of the material already contained in our considered judgments and principles, then they can provide us with an additional reason to move towards certain equilibrium points rather than others, given that the former cohere better with the relevant background theories than the latter. Exactly which sets of ideas that will count as ‘relevant background theories’ is of course a difficult matter to resolve, especially since the way that we lay them out can beg questions against certain conceptions. Daniels points to the importance in the Rawlsian framework of such things as ‘a theory of the person, a theory of procedural justice, general social theory, and a theory of the role of morality in society (including the ideal of a well-ordered society).’19 While there might be a number of background theories (some of which we might not even be aware of as such because we take them too much for granted), my contention here is that the metaphysics of the person is of pivotal importance. When Rawls criticizes utilitarianism for not taking seriously the distinction between persons20 he is certainly leaning on the fact that we have many counter-utilitarian considered judgments about situations in which utilitarianism asks us to sacrifice people for the greater good, but at least implicitly he also leans on the fact that the kind of metaphysics of the person that is able to cohere well with utilitarianism is a ‘container theory’21 that lies quite far from our commonsensical views about the nature of the person. In the

18 ‘Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics’ in The Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979), p. 258. It should be pointed out that the distinction between narrow and wide reflective equilibrium is first drawn by Rawls in ‘The Independence of Moral Theory’ (pp. 289-90), but it is very doubtful whether he has the same distinction in mind as the one elaborated by Daniels, cf. Folke Tersman, Reflective Equilibrium: An Essay in Moral Epistemology (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993), p. 25. 19 Ibid., p. 260. 20 A Theory of Justice, p. 27. 21 Cf. ‘The Independence of Moral Theory’, p. 298.

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debate between different ethical theories, the metaphysics of the person thus provides us with an additional battleground and, as Daniels notes, it is possible that the dispute between such theories is more tractable than disagreements about moral judgments and principles.22 Even if it turns out to be just as intractable, what the ideal of wide reflective equilibrium still does is to raise the stakes involved in ethical theory: to achieve reflective equilibrium becomes a more difficult task simply because there is more that should be made to cohere. It is quite conceivable that some theories, that might look like they can satisfactorily account for our principles and judgments, will falter in providing an account that fits with any reasonable theory of the person (or some other relevant background theory). The conclusion, then, is that the Rawlsian approach does not so much show us a way of doing ethical theory without going into the metaphysics of the person, but rather shows us why it is so reasonable to approach ethics by doing precisely that.

1.3 Metaphysics: Revisionary vs. Descriptive

Even though Rawls prefers not to speak about his position as metaphysical, it would seem that what he really distances himself from is a foundationalist approach. But is not metaphysics the foundationalist discipline par excellence? Maybe in some sense of the notion, but clearly not in the sense that I am interested in here. For while it might be the case that no moral philosophizing can proceed without at least some implicit metaphysics of the person, it is certainly the case that moral philosophizing need not be foundationalist.23 On this matter, a useful distinction has been drawn by Peter Strawson, namely between two kinds of metaphysics, descriptive and revisionary, where the former is ‘content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world’, whereas the latter is ‘concerned to produce a better structure’.24 Given that we accept something like this distinction, a Kantian might occupy either one of these positions. As for Kant himself, Strawson names him, together with Aristotle, as an example of a descriptive metaphysician. However, he also points out that few philosophers are either wholly the one or the other; rather, it is a question of the overall tendency in a philosopher’s thought.

22 Ibid., p. 262. 23 It is because Rawls had distanced himself from a foundationalist approach already in A Theory of Justice that I find it fair to say that his more recent formulation of his approach should not be considered as constituting a break with his former work, but rather as a clarification and a continuation. 24 Individuals - An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 9.

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As an example of a leading moral philosopher who labors towards a revisionary metaphysics of the person one might take Derek Parfit.25 Although his work clearly falls within the consequentialist tradition, and even though it bristles with innovative arguments, it still does not contain any attempt at producing a logically binding argument for a consequentialist position. What Parfit does is rather to provide a metaphysics of the person such that if one accepts it, consequentialism will seem like the natural position to embrace. Parfit seems to assume that a descriptive metaphysics of the person would be Cartesian and he then proceeds to dislodge us from such a position. I will not follow Parfit all the way to his conclusions, partly because I do not think that a satisfactory descriptive metaphysics of the person would be Cartesian, but it must certainly be admitted that his is a most powerful analysis of what it means to be a person, and one that I will have reason to return to. Still, even though I attempt to outline a vindication of common sense morality that is rooted in a descriptive metaphysics of the person, the idea is not that every single commonsensical moral judgment must be vindicated; once the underlying structures are laid bare there might very well be moral implications that run counter to some presently prevailing norms. But then again, as already noted, Strawson’s point is not that metaphysics must be either wholly descriptive or wholly revisionary; rather, it is a question of in which direction one is tending – although it might certainly be noted that the more of a revisionary metaphysician one is, the more one must be able to present some clue as to why we should change our views in such drastic ways. While Strawson’s introduction of the notion of descriptive metaphysics probably did much to re-establish the idea that at least certain ways of doing metaphysics might be philosophically legitimate, this very notion might also be highly misleading since it can make it sound as if there is such a thing as a pure description of our basic categories. But, as should be quite apparent when one gives the matter some thought, the very fact that any descriptive metaphysics inevitably involves a purification of commonsensical thought and practice means that there is a process of selection at work: some things will be deemed more important, others less; some structures will be deemed as basic, others not. In such a process, it is difficult to see how it would be possible at all to proceed without being guided by any philosophical ideals or methodological principles. I would suggest that at the very least the descriptive metaphysician has to rely on three such principles.

25 In the introduction to Reasons and Persons, Parfit acknowledges Strawson’s distinction and affirms his own revisionist temperament: ‘Philosophers should not only interpret our beliefs; when they are false, they should change them’ (p. x).

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To begin with, descriptive metaphysics will hardly be able to get off the ground if we do not accept a principle of rationalization, which involves a methodological commitment to providing a picture of the underlying structures of our thought and practices that makes sense of them. It might perhaps be objected that this kind of principle is adopted by all metaphysicians since they all attempt to provide a rational picture of reality. Nevertheless, there is a clear difference between providing a rational ontology and providing an ontology that rationalizes our everyday thought and practice. To accomplish the latter, it might however be necessary to attempt a metaphysics that is locally revisionary in order to rationalize the remainder of our everyday thought and practice (and this is why descriptive and revisionary metaphysics should not be understood as completely distinct, but rather as constituting two poles on a more or less continuous scale). Now, it might perhaps be said that someone like Parfit is in many ways concerned with backing up commonsensical ideas (even if consequentialism runs counter to some parts of common sense morality it clearly captures others) and that it is thus merely in certain respects that he is revisionary. Perhaps one might even say that what he tries to do is to rationalize common sense. Yet, while Parfit is certainly no speculative thinker like Schopenhauer and can hardly be regarded as that radical a revisionist, the point of a metaphysics that lies close to the descriptive pole is still not so much to rationalize common sense as to rationalize common sense. Accordingly, while the descriptive metaphysician will certainly labor under a methodological commitment that might be called a principle of minimality, according to which one should try to end up with as lean an ontology as possible, i.e. one should stipulate as few categories as possible as the basic building blocks, the difference between a descriptive metaphysician and a revisionary one, e.g. Parfit, might be said to lie in how they treat this second principle in relation to the first one. I would say that what distinguishes descriptive metaphysicians is that for them, this second principle is, at least when it comes to what we regard as important components of our thought and practices, strongly subordinated to the first one. This means that when faced with a choice between adopting a leaner ontology that stays true to most elements of common sense, but which repudiates some important facets of it, and a more complex ontology that retains these important facets as well, the descriptive metaphysician will choose the latter. Even if descriptive metaphysicians accept both of the above principles as constraints on their undertakings, we might perhaps still find that there is something lacking. After all, these principles leave open the possibility of formulating a descriptive metaphysics that is both rational as a system and ontologically lean, but which also runs at odds with those aspects of human

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thought that are not directly involved in everyday life, such as the natural sciences. One might perhaps even see the descriptive metaphysician as striking a truly naïve figure since the fact that we have the sciences telling us a story about the world means that we have access to something in contrast with which the picture painted by the descriptive metaphysician is most likely a mere fiction, a philosophical figment of the imagination. Drawn to its extreme, this idea would imply that there is precious little, of any substance, for the philosopher to do; conceptual analysis can for instance be little more than amateur linguistics. While such extreme naturalism might have its adherents, it is not obvious that it is the descriptive metaphysician who has a naïve view of philosophy; perhaps it is rather the extreme naturalist who has a naïve view of science. After all, even the ‘hardest’ of natural sciences are still human efforts to come to grips with the world and as such they do not exist in radical separation from everyday thought. It is certainly the case that some aspects of everyday life are radically different from some ideas within, say, quantum physics, but the categories we use to describe the world even as scientists do still have their basis in everyday thought and practice. Thus, while descriptive metaphysics might in a narrow sense be understood as a naïve form of anthropocentric conceptual analysis, there is room for a broader approach in which the descriptive metaphysician attempts to anchor her analysis in the bigger picture provided by the natural sciences, perhaps even to understand the place of the natural sciences within human thought. It is still anthropocentric, but it is anchored in an idea about how our grasping the world cannot be anything but that: a grasping of the world. This latter kind of project is certainly that of Kant, and while maybe not the Strawson of Individuals, then certainly the Strawson of Skepticism and Naturalism. In fact, I would venture so far as saying that on the narrow interpretation it does seem somewhat out of place to speak about descriptive metaphysics at all; it would seem more reasonable to simply see it as a form of rather broad conceptual analysis. Accordingly, descriptive metaphysics proper should be understood as falling under a principle of accommodation. This does not mean that a satisfactory metaphysics of the person must be explicated in a terminology that is at every point immediately translatable into the terminology of the natural sciences, but simply that, as a whole, it should not be at odds with them. Why not attempt more, why not aim at a unified theory? While such a goal should not be ruled out on principle it is at the same time a goal which I find, given the way things look now, hard to understand what it would mean to achieve: I do not even have an idea of what such a theory would look like. Strawson himself has put it nicely: ‘Let us settle, for the time being, for “accommodation.” This is a blessedly diplomatic word. It allows for mutual

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recognition, respect, a treaty, even some trade. We may, and perhaps must, be finally content with this.’26

1.4 Descriptive Metaphysics and the Pythagoras Story

Even if we accept that descriptive metaphysicians are at a methodological advantage with respect to the revisionists since they need not get a foothold outside the practices in which we are situated, there is one worry that might make us reluctant to pursue it anyway. After all, both our thinking and our practices change constantly. As time goes by, we start employing new categories and using old categories in new ways. If a predominantly descriptive metaphysics is to be interesting at all, surely it cannot simply be a matter of capturing fleeting features of our thought. Strawson’s response to such worries is this:

[T]here is a massive central core of human thinking which has no history – or none recorded in the history of thought; there are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all. Obviously these are not the specialties of the most refined thinking. They are the commonplaces of the least refined thinking; and are yet the indispensable core of the conceptual equipment of the most sophisticated human beings. It is with these, their interconnexions, and the structure they form, that a descriptive metaphysics will be primarily concerned.27

It should be quite clear that if descriptive metaphysics is to be an interesting project within the field of ethical theory, the Pythagoras story of the history of moral philosophy should largely be the correct one. Not that descriptive metaphysics actually presupposes the Pythagoras story, it is just that if the Pythagoras story is false (and for it to be false it is not enough that there are significant cultural variations in terms of concrete precepts, but that there is not even a common structural core) then a descriptive metaphysics cannot yield results of a truly human generality and thus hardly be of the same interest. Just how much less interesting depends on how low a level of generality is involved. For instance, Rawls’ theory of justice, at least in the developed form that it has achieved with the publication of Political Liberalism, can be understood as providing a descriptive metaphysics, together with a conception of justice, of political thought and practice in the Western world. This is a level of generality that still secures a sufficient degree of interest, but were it to drop below that, it would become increasingly difficult to see the value in pursuing such a project of

26 ‘Reply to Susan Haack’ in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson (Chicago: Open Court, 1998), p. 67. 27 Individuals, p. 10.

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descriptive metaphysics at all. It should however be noted that the bare failure of the Pythagoras story would not automatically mean that revisionary metaphysics becomes viable, since there is still the problem with ascertaining where we can get the foothold for such an enterprise. If a distinctly revisionary metaphysics is to be a contender, it will have to win that status on its own merits, not simply by reference to the fact that there is no interesting form in which descriptive metaphysics can be pursued within this field of inquiry. What may we hope for, then? The classical Kantian gloss on Strawson’s idea about the ahistoricity of certain concepts is of course that certain concepts, or categories, are conditions of the very possibility of experience, understanding, reason, or morality as such. When Nagel sets out on his attempt at a metaphysics of the person, he understands it (and thereby ethics) as an a priori branch of psychology.28 Again, just as the notion of ‘metaphysics’ is apt to arouse suspicion, so is probably the notion of the ‘a priori,’ especially if such conceptual investigations are supposed to yield substantial results. While we might quite naturally have a tendency to take certain of our own concepts as timeless fundamentals, simply because we cannot conceive what it would be like to lead a human life without them, the fact still remains that the conceptual apparatuses which have been employed by different people at different times have varied greatly and it might certainly be doubted if we can ever find some substantive common core. More specifically, it can even more certainly be doubted that we will find a Kantian core at the heart of every such conceptual apparatus.29 Still, even if we recognize that that there are immense differences, it might perhaps be wondered whether such conceptual relativism can be extended all the way down. As human beings we are not some kind of completely disinterested and disembodied beings for whom the world simply exists at a distance and may be conceptually carved up in any which way. We are inextricably tangled up in the world and even if we may interact with the world in a multitude of ways, and the differences between such ways will call for differences in our conceptual equipment, at the very least it remains a fact that we interact with the world and that we use concepts in doing so, and there does also seem to be at least some commonality in the modes that we do so. This need not mean that there are certain concepts that every natural language simply will have; rather the point is 28 Ibid., pp. 3-6. 29 Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Chapter 5, which contains a criticism of Gewirth’s neo-Kantian (more neo than Kantian) position on the account that since Gewirth’s theory of the necessary presuppositions of action involves the fairly modern notion of ‘rights’ as its centerpiece it must fail to deliver a universally valid analysis because there are many cultures which do not possess any such notion and where people have still managed to reason and act in meaningful ways.

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that we have reason to believe that there will be some features in human lives that we will be able to find, in some form or other, in every human community. Thus, we can say that the human life-world is such that there are some things that even if they have, in some language communities, not yet been fully conceptualized, they are still there, ready to be explicated. As Strawson recognizes, even if there is such a thing as a common core of concepts or categories, this does not imply that descriptive metaphysics can at some point become completely over and done with. Since the critical and analytical idiom of philosophy changes constantly, matters need constantly to be re-thought and re-expressed in contemporary terms. Much of Kant’s idiom, to take an obvious example, simply alienates a contemporary reader; in some instances his terminology and ways of phrasing his ideas might perhaps even tend to mislead contemporary readers into finding ideas in Kant that should not be attributed to him. Yet, at least this is the underlying idea of this work, there are profound insights in his thinking about ethics, insights that call out to be rethought in a more contemporary idiom. I will, for example, try to largely do without such notions as ‘noumenal’ and ‘phenomenal’, but also lessen the extent in which ethical matters are expressed in terms of duty.30 However, any attempt to reformulate the ‘essential elements’ in the thought of a historical figure is still always a very precarious business. While an alien idiom might mislead us into uncharitably reading bizarre ideas into a text, it might also lead us into charitably reading in ideas the only fault of which is that they cannot reasonably be attributed to the thinker in question; as Terence Irwin warns:

It is often wise to be skeptical about ‘charitable’ interpretations of a philosopher that offer to restate his ‘essential’ doctrines in less ‘misleading’ terms. This sort of charity has been lavished on Kant by critics from Schopenhauer to Strawson, and we may not always agree with a critic’s view of what is the essential doctrine and what is merely the misleading statement.31

30 The very word ‘duty’ has acquired a ring that is less than sublime. For instance, Marcia Baron notes how one of her friends complained that hearing the word ‘duty’ made him think of the Vietnam War and the draft, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 16. Indeed, one of the main problems with the word ‘duty’ is that it has a history of having been used by governments in trying to encourage their citizens to sacrifice themselves on the battlefield. Because of this persuasive use of ‘duty’, which did not become prevalent until after Kant, the word ‘duty’ has now taken on a tone that unfortunately renders it even philosophically unappealing, at least if we want to be able to move with relative ease between the level of moral theorizing and the level of everyday moral practice and discourse. 31 ‘Morality and Personality: Kant and Green’ in Allen Wood (ed.), Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 32.

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The Kantian approach about to be outlined here is not as far removed from Kant as is Schopenhauer, but probably not as close to Kant as is Strawson. It should however be made clear that although this is a study in Kantian ethics, what I am essentially trying to do is to put forward a position within the Kantian tradition rather than to simply interpret Kant. The problem is just that Kantian ethics is a peculiar tradition since it is held together not by any single core idea, as is the case with consequentialism, but by its connection to a specific thinker. Thus, even if my goal is not primarily interpretative, Kant himself naturally occupies a central place and at times I do venture into some interpretative issues. Although some readers might perhaps feel that there is too much of this, and I can certainly have sympathy for such a point of view, I cannot ultimately say much more to my defense than that I personally happen to find Kant interesting enough to warrant this attention and that such an mixture of the argumentative and the interpretative is by no means foreign to the recent wave of Kantian ethicists that has brought Kantian ethics to the fore of the contemporary debate in a way that makes it into something more than a theory used simply as a textbook contrast to utilitarianism. This recent Kantian renaissance, to which this work naturally owes much if not everything, was very much needed since it made people actually read Kant carefully and not just in the light of some standard picture of what he is about. However, what one finds when one reads Kant is, I would say, both a source of relief and despair. The relief comes from seeing that the ‘textbook Kant’ is merely a one-dimensional construction; the ‘real Kant’ is much more rich and subtle. The despair comes from realizing that while there are certainly several distinct themes in Kant’s writings, there is no univocal doctrine set forth by him. Indeed, his entire critical project evolved over the twenty or so years it occupied him; it was not just a matter of drawing out the implications of his 1781 magnum opus. When he wrote the first Critique, he did not envisage writing a second one, and when he wrote the second one he did not envisage writing a third. Although this does not mean that one cannot try to put together a consistent ethical doctrine from the pieces provided by Kant, it does mean that such an enterprise will always be a matter of construction rather than reconstruction. Accordingly, although there is such a thing as a primarily interpretive approach to Kant’s ethics, there is no such thing as a purely interpretive one. Nevertheless, what I attempt here is not even predominately interpretative. My main interest in Kant is ultimately as a source of ideas. There is nothing dogmatic about it, as if I must always try to see to it that Kant always gets the last word on every issue, it is just that I cannot help finding that Kant has interesting things to say on most issues and that there is consistency enough between them to make it profitable to work within a Kantian framework. Of course, given that my primary aim is to

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attempt a systematic investigation into ethical matters, it might perhaps still be wondered why I spend so much effort not only on Kant but on other historical figures such as Sidgwick and Moore as well; I suppose that I have no conclusive answer to this other than that I concur with Wilfrid Sellars when he points out that ‘The history of philosophy is the lingua franca which makes communication between philosophers, at least of different points of view, possible. Philosophy without the history of philosophy, if not empty or blind, is at least dumb.’32 While philosophy would certainly be empty were it not for the fact that some thinkers at some times put forward path-breaking ideas, the vast amount of labor to be done in philosophy consists in working out the potentials of the ideas of others. This is such a work and, as such, it is necessarily anchored in a certain set of canonical texts.

1.5 An Outline of the Argument

The idea of a wide reflective equilibrium is that there are three different sets that should be made to cohere, (i) considered judgments, (ii) principles, and (iii) background theories. This work focuses on the latter two and more specifically at working out a general ontology of values and norms together with a metaphysics of the person that makes sense of this ontology. Roughly, the order of exposition is that I begin with considering the ontology of value, then move onto matters of the metaphysics of the person, and conclude with considering matters that have to do with the ontology of norms (what Kant would call the metaphysics of morals). This does not mean that I am uninterested in our considered judgments; it is just that I will not go through the process of checking the picture painted here against them. I begin the argument proper in Chapter 2 by considering the Kantian notion of the good will. My three main contentions here is (i) that modern moral philosophy has been conducted under the spell of certain dichotomies that have made us prone to misunderstand what Kantian ethics is about, (ii) that in Anglophone moral philosophy there has also been an unfortunate tendency to read Kant’s doctrine of the good will in the light of G. E. Moore’s thoughts about the intrinsically good, and (iii) that if the value of the good will is to be properly understood it must be interpreted in the context of Kant’s ideas about the highest good, i.e. virtue and happiness in proportion to virtue. Chapter 3 continues with matters having to do with value; more precisely it delves into the question of whether an ontology of values can have any

32 Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 1.

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legitimate place within our overarching picture of the world, or whether, even if it can, this can only be in some kind of secondary sense. I suggest that, on a Kantian approach, the question of the status of value in the world is essentially tied up with the status of freedom in the world and I proceed to tackle these matters together. Kant’s own thinking on this is highly dualistic, revolving around a distinction between the realms of freedom and nature respectively. I provide a modified version of this theory, one that plays down the noumenal/phenomenal distinction and that does not revolve as much around the idea of autonomy as Kant’s own account. On this revised account, rather than understanding human beings as occupying a place in the noumenal world, they are understood as inhabiting, in Wilfrid Sellars’ terminology, the logical space of reasons. I then proceed to argue that the normative entities that make up the contents of this space are justly seen as real existences and that they, at least for the most part, are socially constituted. It is then suggested that although such a position leads to a form of relativism about normative entities, it does still leave room for the existence of universally valid values, norms, and reasons in the sense that these might be grounded in features having to do with the conditions of possibility for being the kind of creatures that can be inhabitants and constituting members of the space of reasons. Chapter 4 continues the argument from the preceding chapter, but more explicitly gears it towards the metaphysics of the person. The most important issue in this chapter concerns the nature of reasons for action and reason as a faculty. I argue against Humean approaches to these matters and then roughly outline a Kantian metaphysics of the person. Given the background of the argument in Chapter 3, this is however a theory that puts a greater emphasis than Kant himself did on the social dimension that is involved in being a person. I conclude by arguing in defense of the idea that there is a dualism of practical reason and suggest that, pace eudaimonism, a complete ethical theory should give an account of both action from self-interest and action from morality, showing how they differ and how they are related to each other. I also point to how these two sides of practical reason correspond to the two components of the highest good as understood by Kant. Chapter 5 returns to the matter of the highest good in the sense that it is an investigation into the nature of one of its constituents, namely happiness. I argue that the standard philosophical theories (or as they are perhaps better called: conceptions) of happiness all fail to capture important features of the way we commonsensically think about these matters. Above all, they fail to properly account for the way in which a subject’s own opinions about what constitutes her happiness are important in determining where her happiness actually lies. Instead, I develop an account of happiness along the lines suggested by Kant,

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who while he never set out an explicit theory of happiness still returned to the topic over and over again and at least provided the outlines of a sound subjectivist theory of happiness. Chapter 6 turns to the second part of the highest good, namely morality. I contrast Kantianism with the other leading theory, consequentialism, that understands morality in terms of an ideal of impartiality and I argue that the Kantian ideal, which can be called ‘impartiality as universalizability’ is superior to the consequentialist one, which can be called ‘impartiality as impersonality’. I then turn to elaborating a version of Kantian ethics that places its emphasis on the Formula of Universal Law and I argue that it is reasonable to understand maxims, or at least those maxims eligible for the universalizability test, as having to do with the basic general principles according to which we live. This kind of interpretation creates a large room for the exercise of judgment on the part of the agent and I conclude that the standards according to which such judgment is exercised are largely determined through our actual moral practices and discourses.

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2. The Value of the Good Will

It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will. – Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 393

Anyone at least vaguely familiar with Kant’s ethics will immediately recognize the opening line of the Groundwork. The bold assertiveness is certainly startling and yet, if one as a reader navigates one’s way through the Groundwork one will realize that Kant does actually not think of himself as making a bold assertion at all; he is simply explicating what he takes to be the commonsensical view on matters. The real philosophical work comes later, when he tries to provide a rational underpinning for his vision of common sense morality. That the real philosophical work lies elsewhere is at least a partial explanation of the fact that, after having been introduced in such a conspicuous way, the notion of the good will drops out of sight throughout most of the remainder of the work. It vanishes out of sight to an extent that might perhaps even make one wonder whether the notion of the good will is at all important in Kant’s moral philosophy. Although other notions, which might be understood as belonging to the same conceptual family as ‘the good will’, are subsequently introduced and discussed, most notably ‘virtue’ (in the second Critique) and ‘disposition’ [Gesinnung] (in the Religion), it remains disputable just how important this whole conceptual family is for Kantian ethics. But this much is abundantly clear: even though, over the last few decades, a virtual Kantian renaissance has taken place in ethical theory, remarkably few follow Kant’s example in taking as their starting point the unique value of a good will. At least to a certain extent, this is probably because philosophers who do normative ethics have tended to understand their field of investigation as structured according to the possibilities opened up by the question of moral rightness; they have been attempting to provide a criterion of moral rightness for actions. Since moral goodness is usually understood as having to do primarily with our motives or character, it becomes, at best, a matter of secondary importance.1

1 A position which has primarily been challenged by virtue ethicists, although it should be acknowledged that in response to such criticisms there are both consequentialists and Kantians who have taken a greater interest in matters pertaining to character. For a consequentialist

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What I will attempt in this chapter is a threefold task. First, I will try to show that the kind of value involved in moral goodness is of a distinct kind; the value of the good will cannot be subsumed under some other category of goodness. Second, I will discuss the ways in which moral goodness have tended to be overlooked as an important category and suggest that ethical theories cannot be narrowly understood as simply being answers to a preordained question, but that the normative outlooks encapsulated by different ethical theories are best understood as also including views about what morality is essentially about. The alleged centrality of the question of rightness, the question to which ethical theories, narrowly understood, tend to be answers, is thus something that is actually a part of those theories, broadly understood. Third, I will argue that an adequate understanding of the value of the good will requires that it is understood in the context of Kant’s theory of the highest good, which is a part of his theory that also succinctly captures the Kantian view of what morality is essentially about.

2.1 The Good Will and Human Dignity

While the fact that Kant begins the Groundwork by so firmly stating the uniqueness of the value of the good will is one of the most well-known features of his moral philosophy, the single idea that has probably had the most success in seeping into general consciousness is his idea that persons, on account of their humanity, have a dignity which means that we should never treat them solely as means but always also at the same time as ends. Not that this idea is always stated in Kant’s exact terms, but often enough it is at least expressed in phrases that echo Kant’s own. Among modern Kantians this idea is also a favorite, although it is often framed in terms of value instead. For instance, Christine Korsgaard has tried to argue that if we are to be able to recognize other values as real, then we must recognize the value of our humanity as the sole unconditioned value, the only intrinsic value,2 and Marcia Baron has presented an interpretation of Kantianism that is built on the idea that persons have a value that is properly acknowledged

example see Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), for a Kantian example see Barbara Herman, ‘Making Room for Character’ in Stephen Engstrom & Jennifer Whiting (eds.), Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 2 ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’ in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For an updated, but more loosely Kantian, version see The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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by honoring rather than promoting it.3 This way of understanding Kant makes it sound as if the key element of a Kantian ontology of values, indeed the very element that makes it interesting to understand Kantianism as a specific theory to be placed against other theories such as utilitarianism, is that Kant accords value to persons, or human beings. Yet, if Kant is serious about the special value of the good will, there seems to be something peculiar about this exalting of the value of humanity and its place in Kant’s ontology of values. Let us look at what Kant says:

In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. If it has a price, something else can be put in its place as an equivalent; if it is exalted above all price and so admits of no equivalent, then it has dignity. /…/ Now morality is the only condition under which a rational being can be an end in himself; for only through this is it possible to be a law-making member in a kingdom of ends. Therefore morality, and humanity so far as it is capable of morality, is the only thing which has dignity. (G 434-5)

As we can clearly see, the value accorded by Kant to persons is essentially tied not so much to our capacity to set ends, but to our capacity for morality. Additionally, it is about how matters are in the Kingdom of Ends that Kant is talking. Since the Kingdom of Ends is something we partake in through morality (because only morality involves the recognition of others necessary for constituting the kind of collective assembly that a Kingdom of Ends is) and since Kant’s position is that we should act as if we were law-making members of the Kingdom of Ends we are also supposed to act as if other people were moral. Thus, while the good will is the only thing that has an unconditioned value, we are to act as if other humans are in possession of such a good will. This is why being in possession of humanity is to be in possession of dignity. Even if the dignity of humanity is the only value that we will have to consider when thinking about others in our deliberations about how to act, this does not mean that it should be understood as the fundamental value in a Kantian ontology of values; that place belongs to the value of the good will. Nevertheless, even if we accept this interpretation of the dignity of humanity some difficulties still remain. It is one thing to say that we are to treat others as if they were law-making members of a Kingdom of Ends, but Kant says something more, he says that we should treat others as ends. While we might have some grasp of what it means to treat others as means, it is not at all clear what it would mean to treat them as ends, in fact this part of Kant’s ethics might even strike the reader as quite unintelligible. In matters of action, an end seems to be what

3 ‘Kantian Ethics’ in Marcia Baron, Philip Pettit & Michael Slote, Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).

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one aims to achieve and how can one aim to achieve something like a person or an abstract feature like ‘humanity’? It might be noted that this is not just a question of the contemporary reader being confused concerning an aspect that was altogether clear in meaning at the time Kant wrote. Even a commentator like Schopenhauer (though not a philosophical contemporary of Kant still a near-contemporary) found Kant’s phrasing of the second version of the Categorical Imperative, the Formula of Humanity, as an ‘artificial and roundabout’4 way of stating the simple idea that we should not just consider ourselves but others as well. A somewhat later commentator like Sidgwick found that ‘[t]he conception of “humanity as an end in itself” is perplexing: because by an End we commonly mean something to be realised, whereas “humanity” is, as Kant says, “a self-subsistent end”.’5 But given how patently absurd it would be to regard something self-subsistent as something that we are to aim at bringing about can this really be what Kant means? It might perhaps be suggested that what we are facing here is a problem that can easily be taken care of by a mere change in terminology. Could we not just simply speak instead of persons as having value in themselves? After all, that something can already exist and have value in itself is at least not a conceptually incoherent idea. Nevertheless, it should be noted here that while such a change of terminology might alleviate the air of paradox surrounding Kant’s position, many might still feel that there is a fundamental flaw in his approach and the worry that might be felt is not that far removed from Sidgwick’s. Overall, when Kant thinks about what it is that has value, he seems to think of objects6 rather than states of affairs. Irrespective of whether we use ‘value’ or ‘end’, or perhaps even ‘purpose’, we face the same kind of problem. When we act, what we strive towards is to realize states of affairs. Accordingly, to realize an end or to promote a value would always seem to involve succeeding in creating some specific state of affairs. Does it not, then, seem reasonable to say that states of affairs, rather than objects, constitute the general metaphysical class of entities around which theories about morality or practical reasoning should be built? Now, I would like to suggest that there are actually two ways in which one might use the notion of an ‘end’ with respect to an action.7 The first way is to think of the end as that which is to be realized by the action. The second is to 4 On the Basis of Morality, p. 96. 5 The Methods of Ethics, 7th Ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 390n. 6 When I speak of ‘objects’ here I do so in a broad sense that includes properties as well; the important thing is the idea that something other than states of affairs are bearers of value. 7 Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 19-20. For another example of the same basic point, see Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 227-8.

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think of the end as that for the sake of which the action occurs. For instance, if I strive to preserve Venice, then the end that I seek to realize is a state of affairs in which Venice persists; but it is also quite possible to say that when I strive in this way it is for the sake of Venice – the city, not any states of affairs in which the city is involved. Perhaps it might be to stretch ordinary language a bit to say that in this latter case Venice is regarded as an end by me, but surely there is something there to stretch our use of ‘end’ towards, something which is captured by this latter use. If we can use ‘end’ in this way it is difficult to see that we could not use ‘value’ in the same kind of way and I feel that even a notion like ‘purpose’ can be used analogously. Had for instance Lancelot at the end of his life said that Guenevere had been the purpose of his life would that not have made sense? (And not in the way that what he had striven for was a state of affairs in which he and Guenevere would be united, but that it was for the sake of her that he did the things he did.) While it must be acknowledged that there is this distinction between two senses of ‘end’, some might claim that in actuality the two always coincide and that there is no sense in theorizing about something for the sake of which we act that is distinct from the states of affairs which we hope to achieve with regard to it. While we might often speak of objects as being what we value, such talk is perhaps best regarded as a form of shorthand: what really has value is the states of affairs in which the object is realized in certain ways, but since those states of affairs usually exist in such an overwhelming multitude it is convenient to speak of the object as what is valuable instead since the object is what ties the states of affairs that we are interested in together. After all, even if Lancelot might have done the things he did for the sake of Guenevere the person, his actual actions always aimed at specific states of affairs. When trying to answer the question of what kind of entities that should be regarded as the primary bearers of value it seems reasonable that we should look at how we reason when thinking about how to act. If I look at my own experience, I must say that normatively my thinking is largely object-oriented. What this means is that there is usually some object that serves as a source of reasons for my actions. This does not mean that states of affairs do not matter, on the contrary, they matter a great deal. Yet, if I look at the direction in which the normativity involved in my thinking runs, it is from object to state of affairs rather than vice versa. If we accept that whatever it is that has value is to be understood as constituting a source of reasons, i.e. as something to which we can trace those concerns that we find normatively relevant and valid when thinking about what to do, then surely objects would seem to be more plausible candidates for being the primary bearers of value. Although states of affairs are what we directly aim at when we act, the distinctly normative part of

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deliberation, i.e. the stage at which we weigh the importance of different concerns, tends to be object-oriented. Furthermore, even when we act we are usually only quite dimly aware of the concrete states of affairs that we try to achieve. We have the kind of familiarity with the world that ensures that we rarely need to make explicit what states of affairs we aim at and we can certainly act purposively in a quite determined and steadfast way without having made very much explicit about the concrete states of affairs we are striving to realize; rather the purposiveness of our acting lies in letting ourselves be guided by the normative light cast by the objects that we value. Some might perhaps object that even if this would be correct as a phenomenological analysis, it is nothing more than that. But it is not at all clear that phenomenological points can be brushed aside without there being some strongly objectivist grounds for doing so. If one, as a Kantian surely does, regards the existence of values in the world as inherently tangled up with the existence of us as valuers, then it is quite natural to think that the kind of beings that we are largely determines the way that values exist, for instance whether they adhere primarily to states of affairs or to objects. Accordingly, if we function in a way that is primarily object-oriented rather than oriented towards states of affairs, then it should not be a surprising result that the primary bearers of value are objects rather than states of affairs. One might of course not be a Kantian, but the same point holds for other forms of subjectivist positions. If, on the other hand, one sees values as being metaphysically independent with respect to us, the way that we think about value would certainly carry considerably less weight in settling matters about the nature of value, just as our everyday thinking about the relation between space and time might not be a definitive guide to the true nature of the relation between space and time. However, if we wish to hold this kind of strong independence thesis, then we must also accept the burden of showing how we are to make sense of the existence of values at all and in what way we are to be able to reach any conclusive views about their nature. Even if we shun away from such a strong form of realism and take a more pragmatic stance, adherents of the states of affairs interpretation might say that since it is still always states of affairs that lie immediately before us in our deliberative field of vision it is the value of these that are of primary interest to us when we think about how to act – and if this is true, why bother about the value of objects at all on a theoretical level? Our concrete deliberations might perhaps be simpler if we sometimes think in terms of objects, but our theory will be simpler if we restrict the bearing of value to states of affairs. We can thus also get a simpler understanding of what it means to be valuable, namely to be something that should be realized. If we postulate other things, that cannot be realized, as possible bearers of value, we cannot have this simple theory of value.

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Naturally, those theories that do rely on other things being the bearers of value might perhaps capture important intuitions that we have, but since even such theories view these values as important for the way we act and since it is still states of affairs that we act to realize, we can always translate our talk about the values of objects into talk about sets of states of affairs. The problem with this argument is that while simplicity is a virtue in theories, its value is a strongly conditioned one and, in this case, simplicity would be bought at the price of begging the question against certain ethical theories. While there might be some possibility to construct a non-consequentialist ethical theory while still only relying on reasons having to do with realizing states of affairs, it would become a very messy affair and any theory that we did in the end manage to come up with would most likely strike us as quite unpalatable. Accordingly, the idea that ‘we might as well focus on states of affairs anyway’ is really biased in favor of consequentialism: it creates a playing-field that is in principle open to non-consequentialists, but the ensuing match is fixed from the outset. What might seem as a formal meta-ethical question (‘What are the bearers of value?’) is thus really not one that can be meaningfully ventured into without at the same time venturing into substantive ethical theorizing. While there is obviously more to be said about these matters, it is time to move on to other related issues and in doing so I must take a terminological stance. Given what has been said, it seems that the reasonable thing to do is to use an object-oriented terminology. In what follows, I will largely speak of things when discussing what it is that is valuable. Of course, it should also be pointed out that to conclude that it makes sense to see objects as ends is only a preliminary: it remains to be shown what it means to treat persons as ends, but that is a discussion that I will postpone until the final chapter. At this point, the primary subject matter is still the value of the good will and it is now high time to turn to the question of whether it makes sense to claim, as Kant does, that the good will is the only thing that can be regarded as unqualifiedly good.

2.2 Moore and the Idea of ‘Intrinsic Value’

The question of what, if anything, is unqualifiedly good, is clearly not uniquely Kantian. In fact, if one reads Kant under the influence of 20th century Anglophone moral philosophy, it is difficult not to note the resemblance with another towering figure in the history of ethics, namely G. E. Moore. According to Moore, one of the fundamental tasks of ethics was to become clear about which things have what he calls intrinsic value. Not that philosophers before Moore had not been interested in reaching results about which things are good, but the publication of the Principia Ethica transformed the terminological and

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methodological manner in which such investigations were pursued. As usual when a new piece of terminology is introduced, it is tempting to start reading the philosophers of the past through the philosophical lenses thus introduced. Prior to Moore, moral philosophers tended to understand their task as trying to discover the summum bonum. Kant noted that this notion is in fact ambiguous since it might be taken to mean both the supreme good and the perfect good (CPrR 110). Briefly put, Kant’s own position was that virtue, which can be understood as an empirical manifestation of the good will, constitutes the supreme good since its value is not conditioned on anything else, but that the perfect good also includes happiness. The latter has a value that is conditioned on virtue, the function of which is accordingly to make us worthy of happiness.8 Moore seems to understand Kant as attempting to give an answer to what is intrinsically good and, where Kant notes an ambiguity in the notion of the summum bonum, Moore notes a contradiction in Kant and comments on the matter:

Kant’s view that virtue renders us worthy of happiness is in flagrant contradiction with the view, which he implies and which is associated with his name, that a Good Will is the only thing having intrinsic value. It does not, indeed, entitle us to make the charge sometimes made, that Kant is, inconsistently, an Eudaemonist or Hedonist: for it does not imply that happiness is the sole good. But it does imply that the Good Will is not the sole good: that a state of things in which we are both virtuous and happy is better in itself than one in which the happiness is absent.9

Of course, not even a Kantian should rule out the possibility that Kant might be flagrantly contradicting himself; but then again, not even a non-Kantian should be as swift as Moore in concluding that this is what Kant does. One possible rejoinder is that Moore is actually conflating two distinctions that need to be kept separate from each other. Although ‘intrinsic value’ is sometimes treated as being opposed to ‘instrumental value’, it has been argued by Christine Korsgaard that such a characterization is misleading.10 Korsgaard agrees with Moore that

8 ‘Inasmuch as virtue and happiness together constitute the possession of the highest good for one person, and happiness in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a person and his worthiness to be happy) constitutes that of possible world, the highest good means the whole, the perfect good, wherein virtue is always the supreme good, being the condition having no condition superior to it, while happiness, though something always pleasant to him who possesses it, is not of itself absolutely good in every respect but always presupposes conduct in accordance with the moral law as its condition.’ (CPrR 110-11) 9 Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. 174-75. 10 ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’ in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996). For an earlier statement of the same kind of observation, see A. C. Ewing, The Definition of Good (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 114.

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for something to have intrinsic value is for it to have a value that is not dependent on anything outside the thing as such. Understood this way, the proper contrast to intrinsic value would be extrinsic value, i.e. a kind of value that is dependent on something that lies outside of the thing to which it belongs. Instrumental value is certainly extrinsic, but the proper contrast to it is rather final value. Things that have final value might have such value in a way that makes it intrinsic, but conceptually there is nothing in the notion of final value that rules out that something has a value that is both final and extrinsic. It might just so happen that every instance of final value is also an instance of intrinsic value and that every instance of intrinsic value is an instance of final value; but even if that would be the case, something that surely should be left open for investigation, this is not something that is conceptually necessary. Accordingly, there is a philosophical value in keeping these two distinctions apart. The relevance of this with respect to Moore’s accusation against Kant is quite clear. There is nothing peculiar about happiness being a part of the perfect good in the way Kant outlines if this is understood as happiness having a final value that is extrinsic, i.e. the final value that it can have is dependent on it being a part of a whole together with virtue. Moore seems to think that since Kant views the good will, or virtue, as the only unqualified good, he must also, if he is to be consistent, view it as the sole final good: but given Korsgaard’s valid point, it would seem that rather than Kant being guilty of a contradiction, it is Moore that is guilty of a conflation.11 However, while Korsgaard is correct on an analytical level, the use she is able to make of these distinctions suggests that we do perhaps have reason to look further into the matter. Korsgaard has two versions of her view about what fits the bill of intrinsic value. The first12 starts from the idea that there must be something that has intrinsic value for the extrinsically valuable must get its value from some source, and the ability to project, or confer, value seems to be an obvious candidate for being such a source of value. The problem is just that Korsgaard not only treats this as an interesting candidate to be further investigated, she seems to think it follows from the fact that we confer value, that we are, so to speak, the sources of value, that we must ourselves be valuable. 11 There is an alternative way of reading Moore’s complaint, namely that since Kant must admit that the highest good is also unqualifiedly good, the good will cannot be the sole unqualified good. This is certainly a correct observation, but I do not think that it is what Moore is after, his point is rather that Kant’s views about the highest good commits him to also holding that happiness is an unqualified good, or as Moore would put it: has intrinsic value. At any rate, the alternative version would be a trivial complaint compared to the charge that Kant cannot accord value to happiness without contradicting himself. 12 Presented in ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’.

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This is however clearly a non sequitor. It might certainly be the case both that we ourselves are valuable and that we confer value to other things, thus making them valuable, but this remains to be shown and the picture of the relation between our value and the value of other things suggested by Korsgaard is at any rate a metaphysically peculiar one; she makes it sound as if we are some kind of reservoirs of value and that we can then pour this normative substance on top of things.13 She has however moved away from this view. The new position adopted by her is that we as persons also confer value onto ourselves.14 On this account of the value of persons there is a dependence relation, since this value presupposes the existence of an attitude of valuing, but it is an internal relation since the projector of value is identical with that onto which value is projected. Since we as persons are thus not dependent for our value on anything outside ourselves, our value is intrinsic in the Moorean sense. This is certainly a very neat attempt at combining subjectivism with objectivism, but there are difficulties with this view as well. The most obvious one is that when we think of things as having intrinsic value, surely such value must have some form of intersubjective validity and if the person is not already in hold of some value that she can confer, then it is doubtful whether she can simply create such value ex nihilo in a way that makes its existence intersubjectively valid. Even if Korsgaard’s argument succeeds and she manages to show that we really must regard ourselves as valuable (this is what to ‘confer value’ onto ourselves would mean in this context) in order to intelligibly value the things we pursue, the problem with this value that I presumably must accord myself is that others are not trapped in the same way that I am within my own deliberative field of vision. Given this fact, can we really take the value that we seemingly must accord ourselves truly seriously or would we rather say that as a simple matter of fact we must behave as if we ourselves are valuable? But then the Korsgaardian analysis seems to have reduced value to a cognitive error, a form of deliberative blind spot that we might have to live with in our own case, but which we can plainly see as just what it is in others.15 Given the above, I would like to explore another way of making sense of the difference between Kant and Moore. As is well-known, in his Principia Ethica Moore offers a test for ascertaining whether things have intrinsic value. It

13 Jerome Schneewind, ‘Korsgaard and the Unconditional in Morality’, Ethics 109 (1998), p. 39. 14 The new position is developed in The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For an explicit acknowledgment of this change of views, see ‘Motivation, Metaphysics, and the Value of the Self,’ Ethics 109 (1998), p. 63 15 It should be made clear that Korsgaard is aware of this kind of problem and in the next chapter, I will consider her strategy for dealing with it.

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consists in considering whether a given thing would have any value if it existed by itself, i.e. in what Moore calls ‘absolute isolation’.16 Kant does not offer us a method in the Moorean way of explicitly setting out and naming a procedure, but he does nevertheless use a quite specific one, namely what might be called ‘the method of combination’. It consists in considering different things that might seem like candidates for having unconditioned value and then see whether there are any combinations with other things that make these original things lose their value (G 393-4). Kant considers talents of the mind, such as intelligence, wit, and judgment, qualities of temperament, such as courage, resolution, and constancy of purpose, gifts of fortune, such as power, wealth, and health – and he finds that they are all alike in being fine and useful, but also in that they can become instruments of immoral behavior. In such cases, they lose their value. They might even directly worsen the situation since they make the immoral person even more dangerous. An evil person who is intelligent, brave, powerful, and wealthy is surely a terrible figure. Even a reader unsympathetic to Kant’s project need not find these particular results especially surprising or controversial since the value of the above-mentioned features might very well be best understood as instrumental anyway (and instrumental value is bound to be contingent). Kant does however also consider another candidate, one that is hardly something that we are prone to see as merely instrumentally valuable, namely happiness. We might perhaps not agree on what happiness consists in, but whatever its constituents are, must its value not be intrinsic? Some might even find it obvious that if there is any single thing that is without a doubt unqualifiedly good, it is happiness. Yet, for Kant, not even happiness can be considered good without qualification; and again it is the possibility of being combined with immorality that is the problem. Unlike some ancient philosophers, Kant has no problem with the idea that one can be both happy and evil. On this point at least I think he is in concordance with common sense and perhaps even his view that the value of happiness is conditioned is commonsensical if we keep in mind that the question here is not whether happiness is something we all consider as something we want to have, but whether all instances of it has value. After all, one standard objection to standard utilitarianism is that it assigns value even to perverted instances of pleasure (e.g. the pleasure some torturers might take in their craft) and Kant’s thinking seems to be in line with this kind of argument. Since it is the possibility of existing in co-presence with an evil will that rules out all the candidates considered this far, the obvious candidate for being good without qualification is the good will. It is the only thing that per definition

16 Principia Ethica, p. 187.

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precludes being able to coexist with immorality. There might, of course, be other factors with which the good will can coexist and which thus could spoil its value and Kant considers what is probably the most reasonable candidate for fitting this bill, namely the possibility that a good will, due to unfortunate circumstances, does not succeed in carrying out its good intentions. But he finds that ‘even then it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake as something which has its full value in itself’ (G 394). We must keep in mind that this does not mean that it does not matter whether we succeed or not; success in moral undertakings usually means that some final value is brought about or preserved and so a good will plus success is certainly better than a good will without success. All it means is that the nature of the value of the good will per se is such that it is not conditioned on success. At this point, we are of course dealing simply with appeals to our intuitions and they are always difficult to prove anything conclusively from, but is not Kant’s position, when we think through what it means, actually quite sound and in accordance with common sense? If we compare Kant’s method with the Moorean test then there is surely an obvious problem with the latter in that it rests on a highly questionable assumption. After all, do we have any independent reason for thinking that just because a certain thing has value when existing alone, it will also have this value when accompanied by other things? The idea behind the Moorean test is presumably that if a thing has value when alone, then that value springs from its internal properties and since it keeps these in all circumstances where it remains identical to itself then it should also keep its value in all circumstances where it is identical with itself. This might perhaps sound reasonable and I suspect that many philosophers have simply taken it for granted. Nevertheless, the kind of things that we tend to assign value to are not ontologically robust in the sense that their significance as objects is always constant at the core; we always encounter them as deeply situated in some context or other. Take, for instance, a thing like friendship. We can certainly consider friendship in the abstract, but what we have then is merely a very thin structure, which might be what defines something as an instance of friendship, but which is still so underdescribed that while we might perhaps be able to say something about the inherent tendency, in terms of value, of friendship ‘as such’, it is difficult to see how we could extrapolate from this to any conclusions about the value of every instance of friendship. For a concrete friendship to exist at all it must be fleshed out beyond the thin structure which defines it as friendship to begin with, and there are just so many ways in which this structure can be fleshed out. Why think that we can draw conclusions about the value of every such instance simply by considering friendship in the abstract?

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The fact that Moore’s method of absolute isolation must be rejected as a conclusive test does not mean that we have to give up the idea that there might be at least something that has a value that it keeps no matter how it is situated. It would however seem that the only plausible test for such value is the one utilized by Kant, namely that of placing the candidate in diverse contexts. Of course, this test is in one sense less satisfactory than Moore’s since it is open-ended; there is an infinite number of contexts and whereas the method of absolute isolation only requires of us that we place our candidate in one of them, Kant’s method of combination would seem to leave us with an infinite task. However, although there is in theory an infinite number of possibilities to be covered, there is little ground for the belief that this prevents us from being able to at least reasonably regard some things as having absolute value. Perhaps we would ideally like to place our candidates in all conceivable contexts; but not only is this hardly practical, it is not even especially meaningful since we do already have a good grasp of what kinds of contexts are potentially relevant. Indeed, of all the infinite modifications we can make of the contexts that we conceive, there are not very many that strike us as reasonable candidates for having an impact on the status of the things we might regard as reasonable candidates for being put to the test to begin with. Given that we have the kind of normative competence that makes us eligible as judges in the test procedure at all, it seem very unlikely that we would make startling discoveries underway. To have a value that is absolute, or as Kant puts it in the opening sentence of the Groundwork: without qualification, is to have a value that cannot be spoiled, no matter what context the thing which has the value is put in, i.e. it is a value that is not conditioned or dependent on anything. But while this way of putting it is intuitively graspable, I do think that there is, in the notion of ‘dependence’, an ambiguity that needs to be explored.17 Take for instance the value of courage. We certainly admire courage. Perhaps we even sometimes continue to admire courage in villains, but if we do, I still suspect that this only applies to some villains. The daring cat burglar might have a certain beguiling charm, the daring child molester is however hardly someone about whom we would say ‘Ah yes, he does all those terrible things, but you still have to admire his courage’. Some villains are just impossible to romanticize about. And yet, there is something about courage as such, the ability to stand up against dangers, which we do find admirable. Thus, it would seem that we would like to say that courage as such is admirable, even valuable, it is just that the courage of certain persons, such as detestable villains, is not. The value of courage seems to be dependent on outside factors in a negative rather than a positive way and, accordingly, I think

17 Cf. Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), pp. 55-6.

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that we should be able to distinguish between a weak and a strong sense of ‘intrinsic value’. I will refer to the weaker sense as ‘intrinsic value’ and the stronger sense as ‘absolute value’, the latter being a subset of the larger class of ‘intrinsic value’: Absolute value: A thing has absolute value when there is nothing outside it that

either the presence or absence of which is a condition of its value.18 Intrinsic value: A thing has intrinsic value when there is nothing outside it the

presence of which is a condition of its value. That which has absolute value certainly has intrinsic value, but that which has intrinsic value need not have its value in an unqualified sense. While it is not in need of having its value conferred on it by anything outside it, there is still some thing, or some things, that can blot out this value. This means that there is a sense in which its value is relative, since it is relative to the absence of something, like an evil will, and if we understand the issue of intrinsic vs. extrinsic value to be a matter of the features that one might cite in favor of something having value, i.e. the supervenience base consists simply in good-making properties and not non-bad-making properties as well, there is nothing peculiar about widening the notion of intrinsic value so that negative dependence does not rule out having intrinsic value (whereas positive dependence would make the value in question extrinsic (which in turn is fully compatible with it being a final value)). I suspect that if we draw this kind of distinction and take it seriously we will find that many of the things that we might otherwise, for instance if we employ Moore’s method of absolute isolation, be inclined to judge as having intrinsic value in the strong sense, i.e. what I call ‘absolute value’, would more properly be regarded as intrinsic values in the weaker sense. There is, however, one device that might be employed by the Moorean to avoid having to move in such a direction, and I will now turn to consider it.

2.3 Organic Unities and Moral Goodness

As anyone familiar with the Principia Ethica will know, Moore is no stranger to the fact that how things are combined matters greatly for what value things will

18 This definition lies close to the one Moore gives of intrinsic value in ‘The Conception of Intrinsic Value,’ Philosophical Studies (London: Kegan Paul, 1922): ‘To say that a kind of value is “intrinsic” means merely that the question whether a thing possesses it, and in what degree it possess it, depends solely on the intrinsic nature of the thing in question.’ (p. 260).

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have. He pays much attention to the phenomenon that he calls ‘organic unity,’ to the fact that the value of a whole need to equal the sum of the value of its parts. Yet, for Moore, not even incorporation into an organic unity can however change the value of a thing qua the thing that it is. The organic unity effect is only something that occurs on the level of the whole qua whole. Thus, what we get is an additional value, to be added to the value of the individual things that make up the whole. This way of understanding organic wholes should however not be taken as the only possible one. In a recent paper, Thomas Hurka has distinguished between two ways of accounting for organic unities: the Moorean one, which he dubs the ‘holistic’ interpretation, and a ‘conditionality’ interpretation, which he associates with Korsgaard’s Kantian approach. According to the latter interpretation, parts can change their value when they enter certain wholes.19 What is at stake here is the interpretation of the kind of cases that Kant considers when trying to give intuitive support for his thesis that only the good will has absolute value. If the Moorean approach to organic unities is plausible, then there is room to interpret these cases as ones where the combination of an evil will and some other thing creates an additional value that on the level of the total whole, i.e. the holistic whole plus the component parts, matches the value of the other thing in a way that makes the value of the whole as bad as the negative value of the evil will (or perhaps even somewhat worse), i.e. rather than the value of, say, happiness being blotted out by the co-presence of an evil will, its positive contribution is countered by the additional negative value of the whole qua whole. By postulating such holistic effects, it would accordingly seem that the Moorean could always get the same net result as the adherent of the conditionality interpretation. This versatility makes it difficult to see how the dispute between these two models can be settled by appeals to our intuitions about concrete cases. It would thus seem to be a good idea to approach the matter in a somewhat broader way. Organicity is traditionally understood as a mode of formation that is contrasted with a mechanic mode. More specifically, the notion of an organic whole is tied to that of an organism. Kant’s definition of organism is this: ‘an organized natural product is one in which every part is reciprocally both end and means’ (CJ 376). Although such a view is certainly primarily formulated with respect to biological phenomena, Kant is open to the possibility that we might analogously understand society as an organic whole, one where ‘no member should be a mere means, but should also be an end, and, seeing that he contributes to the possibility of the entire body, should have his position and

19 ‘Two Kinds of Organic Unity,’ The Journal of Ethics 2 (1998).

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function in turn defined by the idea of the whole’ (CJ 375n1). This latter way of using the idea of organic unity is one that was common among the British Idealists, who dominated English philosophy around the time when Moore wrote the Principia Ethica. There is therefore nothing peculiar about Moore using the notion of organic unity; it was certainly very much in the air at the time when he wrote his book. Yet, both the biological employment of the notion of organic unity and the analogous political employment of it have to do with contexts where there is a causal interaction between parts and even though we might loosen the notion of organic unity and allow that certain kinds of value compounds might be called organic unities, it still remains a fact that on the Moorean story there is something blind about the way in which holistic value effects arise, a blindness that runs counter to the very idea of organicity. One way of understanding the place of the doctrine of organic unities in Moore’s theory is that organic value is something he simply has to throw in to patch up deficiencies that are really due to system errors in his overall theory. He wants to be able to draw certain conclusions about certain concrete issues and must postulate holistic value effects in order to be able to do so. Moore is however not alone in this; as noted by Elizabeth Anderson, consequentialists regularly ‘derive the “right” results by appealing to occult calculations or mysterious intuitions of brute facts about organic intrinsic values.’20 She compares this tendency to the pre-Copernican practice of drawing epicycles to account for the seemingly peculiar behavior of the planets.21 For all the ingenuity that might be employed in such efforts, the fact remains that they are but desperate attempts to patch up theories that are flawed to the core. In order to see this more clearly we might do well to consider one of Moore’s most well-known examples of an organic whole, one that is presented when he outlines a way in which vindictive punishment might be justified. As might be expected, we do not get any argument or elucidation of why things are as they are. Moore just states his view: ‘The infliction of pain on a person whose state of mind is bad may, if the pain be not too intense, create a state of things that is better on the whole than if the evil state of mind had existed unpunished.’22 It should be noted here that Moore tries to establish the reasonableness of vindictive punishment without any notion of desert. Usually this notion is used to provide a rationale as to why punishment might be justified, but in Moore’s case the exposition makes the whole matter look like a fluke: a set of values that we simply intuit as appearing together. Behind all this

20 Ibid., p. 89. 21 Ibid., p. 90. 22 Principia Ethica, p. 214.

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oddness is of course the Moorean insistence of the primacy of the good over the right, a structural feature of his theory that makes it impossible for him to provide any reasoned account of these matters since such an order of explanation precludes any substantial conception of desert. On the Moorean approach there is this thing called ‘value’ and the only difference that exists between different instances of value is that they are either greater or lesser, i.e. a purely quantitative difference. This kind of approach makes it difficult to develop any picture of how different matters of value fit together as wholes in any other way than that we happen to look at them as compounds. Accordingly, the person who attempts to develop an ontology of values within a Moorean framework does really become like a pre-Copernican astronomer, simply noting what he sees and thinking that the orbits of the planets must be just like that, no matter how many epicycles he has to draw. Just as we get no story from the pre-Copernican about what lies behind the peculiar behavior of the planets, we get no story from the Moorean about what lies behind the peculiar effects that arise from certain combinations. In contrast to Moore, Kant’s approach represents an attempt to understand what is happening rather than just noting what we intuit. Although he is still interested in what we intuitively think about different matters of value, this interest is coupled with an attempt to think about our relation as thinkers, observers, and agents to the values which we appear to find when we think about different situations. Compare, for instance, Moore’s remarks on vindictive punishment with Kant’s approach to the matter of the relation between virtue and happiness. Kant’s point is that the good will makes us worthy of happiness, i.e. he has an idea about the nature of the value that is involved in one of the parts of the highest good, an idea that serves to explicate the nature of the value of the highest good as a whole. Of course, we might not share Kant’s intuitions about the value of the good will or the value of happiness, but at least he tries to explicate the dynamics of value that is involved, while the Moorean approach simply notes in an impressionistic manner that certain holistic effects arise.23 This difference between Kant and Moore also gives us ground for querying whether Korsgaard’s position does not, even though she is at pains to distance herself from an orthodox Mooreanism, involve a reading of Kant that is still too 23 Anderson makes a similar point when she notes how the Moorean approach ‘mirrors the norms of appreciation for objects in a museum’, ibid., p. 120, although even in a museum there is the possibility of more sophisticated analyses than what the Moorean impressionism allows. For an amusing account, quoted at length by both Anderson and Alasdair MacIntyre, of the inarticulate modes of persuasion in the discussions of the Bloomsbury group (Moore’s gasps of incredulity, Strachey’s grim silences, etc.), see John Maynard Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs,’ Two Memoirs (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), p. 85.

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Moorean in the sense that it treats value as too homogenous a thing. There is no notion of desert at work in Korsgaard’s analysis: for her the absolutely good is humanity, understood as the capacity to confer value onto things, and the centrality of morality in Kant’s theory of value is thereby lost. As a criticism against Korsgaard the point that she is not Kantian enough is naturally of limited value since her approach is largely the same one as mine here, trying to reach a reasonable position on ethical matters by drawing on Kantian materials. Still, given that one has methodologically committed oneself to taking Kant with a special seriousness not accorded other philosophers, the fact that he seems to have an approach even more different from Moore’s than Korsgaard assumes is at least a reason to delve deeper into what these further differences might yield that is of philosophical value. The suggestion that I will pursue here is that in contrast to Moore and most of those who have labored in the long philosophical shadow cast by him, Kant rejects the idea that there is a strong form of unity in the notion of ‘good’. What this means is that there is no such thing as being good period, at least not in the sense that we can speak of something being good without saying anything about the kind of goodness we are talking about.

2.4 The Disunity of ‘Good’

If we wish to say anything of substance about different kinds of goodness it would perhaps seem that we must, at least to some extent, be able to analyze ‘goodness’ as such. And yet, as is well-known, another key part of the Moorean legacy in moral philosophy is the idea that ‘good’ is a simple, non-analyzable property24 – not that everyone would agree with Moore on this point, but his stance is at least one that most would acknowledge that you must position yourself in relation to when discussing the matter. Of course, in his attack against analyses of ‘good’, what Moore is primarily objecting to is what he calls naturalism, i.e. attempts to analyze ‘good’ in non-evaluative terms, and this specific part of Moore’s position lies close to the classic Humean idea about a gap between the descriptive and the normative. Such a position does not preclude the possibility of analyzing normative notions in, at least partly, normative terms. Indeed, Moore himself understood ‘right’ as meaning something like ‘conduciveness to the good.’25 Perhaps this latter kind of analysis does not really deserve to be seen as a form of analysis proper, but rather as something like an explication of rightness, yet that is of lesser interest here. The point is rather that Moore would seem to think that rightness is at least

24 Ibid., pp. 9-10. 25 Ibid., pp. 18, 25.

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explicable whereas ‘good’ is not. To some extent, this differentiation makes sense since while goodness is for him something we simply intuit (thus leaving it ripe for an analogy with other (allegedly) simple and non-analyzable qualities like ‘yellow’), rightness is something we figure out through a process of computation. The ability to simply apprehend goodness, analogous to our ability to simply apprehend colors, is however a deeply problematic ability since we would hardly like to stipulate some kind of sixth sense. If there is a moral sense, then it must rather consist in some kind of Bildung that enables us to judge wisely. But such a form of moral sense is not as naturally paired with the idea that goodness is a simple property. Accordingly, those who like W. D. Ross26 turn against Moore’s differentiation and argue that ‘right’ is just as non-analyzable as ‘good’ strike me as going in the wrong direction, at least if ‘non-analyzable’ is understood as meaning that something is inexplicable in the sense that we cannot even analyze it in partly normative terms. The more properties we claim to be non-analyzable, the more we mystify how we can have a grasp of the concepts corresponding to those properties. It might also be noted that Moore himself is, by way of his analysis of ‘right’, actually committed to at least a partial analysis of ‘good’: since rightness is about promoting the good, it would seem that one key aspect of ‘good’ is that being good has to do with being an appropriate object of promotion. However, even if we accept this, the Moorean idea that goodness is a unitary property is still viable since this kind of analysis, or explication, does not in any interesting sense open up for there being different species of value: goodness is a single homogenous property just as rightness is a single homogenous property. This Moorean picture of two homogenous properties is certainly attractive since it makes life easier for the moral philosopher; according to it the task at hand would be simply to say something abut the good and the right and their relation to each other. It might be noted that both Moore and Ross are pluralists about the things that are good, it is just that they, and those who follow their lead, are monists about what it means for something to be good. If, on the other hand, there are different species of value, there might be interesting relations between different species of goodness and a satisfactory ethical theory would accordingly have to involve a higher degree of complexity than the kind of consequentialist approach which Moore exemplifies, or even the deontologist one represented by Ross. In order for it to be philosophically meaningful to distinguish between different kinds of value, it should be possible to say something more about what it means to have a certain value and why it is important to keep different forms

26 The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), Chapter 1.

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of value distinct. This need not necessarily mean that we must be able to provide some kind of reductive analysis of each and every kind of value, but at least we should be able to say something about the contexts where they are relevant and a few words about how different contexts are related to each other (if they are related, that is). There are many contexts in which we use the notion of ‘good,’ but since the subject matter here is ethical theory it is perhaps not necessary to attempt to explicate all such uses of ‘good’. There are however a couple of candidates that should for historical reasons be taken seriously. One is the prudentially good which has to do with what makes our lives go well. Another is the morally good, which is of course the kind of goodness so cherished by Kant. A third is what might be called functional goodness, which has to with functioning well and which is, of course, an important part of Aristotle’s ethical theory. While Moore and Ross make it sound as if there simply this slot ‘the good’ which is part of any ethical theory and which is to be filled with a list of empirical items, it is not evident that all these three forms of goodness are good in the same way, for instance that the essence of their value lies in being appropriate objects of promotion. Given Kant’s view on the special value of the good will, we should not be surprised to find him among those who maintain that there is a contrast between different ways in which things can be good and there is indeed one passage where he clearly voices such a view, namely when he deplores the poverty of Latin as compared with German:

The German language has the good fortune to possess expressions which do not permit this difference [between senses of ‘bonum’ and ‘malum’] to be overlooked. It has two very different concepts and equally different expressions for what the Latins named with the single word bonum. For bonum, it has das Gute and das Wohl; for malum, das Böse and das Übel or das Weh. Thus there are two very different judgments if in an action we have regard to its goodness or wickedness or to our weal or woe. (CPrR 59-60)

It is interesting that the same characteristic of German is noticed by Franz Brentano as well, although in his eyes as a highly unfortunate feature. More precisely, it is the lack of a single contrary to ‘gut’ that he finds deplorable since it might mislead people into not seeing the essential unity of the concept of ‘good’. Brentano invokes Aristotle’s dispute with Plato in NE I and distinguishes between two ways of seeing ‘good’, as univocal in the strict sense or as univocal in an analogous sense.27 But what is really at stake here? What would it mean for ‘good’ to be univocal in a strict rather than an analogous sense?

27 The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, ed. Oskar Kraus, trans Roderick Chisholm & Elizabeth Schneewind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 75.

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If the concept of ‘good’ is to have an essential unity then what that must mean is that the full explication of its normativity is to be the same in all contexts of application. Brentano certainly thinks that this is the case and his analysis of goodness is that for something to be good is for it to be a worthy object of love.28 One might perhaps still want to leave open the possibility that there are some uses of ‘good’ that are not relevant for the purposes of analysis. More specifically, if this kind of analysis is to be reasonable at all then it should probably be confined to being an analysis of non-derivative goodness. However, while there might be some obvious examples of derivative forms of goodness, instrumental goodness being an example that comes immediately to mind, it would be inappropriate to be dogmatic about what kinds of goodness are derivative and which are non-derivative. The reason is that if there is to be any point to the analysis one should not from the outset beg the question against potential dissenters. A more reasonable approach is rather to look carefully at those instances of goodness that seem to run counter to the proposed analysis and think about whether they can be understood as derivative forms of goodness in some plausible sense. This being said, I would like to distinguish between four positions that one might take on the question of the unity or disunity of ‘good’: (i) Strong unity thesis: Goodness is a single homogenous property. On one reading of Brentano’s analysis it falls within this category. But while ‘love’ might strike the casual reader as a specific attitude Brentano actually defines it in a way that leaves it meaning no more than simply a pro-attitude.29 Since he is prepared to acknowledge that there is a variety of emotions that we might have with respect to an object it would seem that there is room to say that goodness is not a single property since there is a possibility to claim that one might differentiate a number of kinds of goodness based on different kinds of appropriate attitudes.30 An example of someone who does more clearly seem to adhere to the strong unity thesis is Philip Pettit, who has an approach to goodness that is closer to Moore than to Brentano since it is framed in terms of a response rather than an attitude: the appropriate response with respect to that which is good is to promote it.31 Of course, Pettit’s view does leave open that in concrete situations

28 Ibid., p. 18. 29 Ibid., p. 16. 30 This is certainly how A. C. Ewing’s very similar analysis in The Definition of Good should be understood since he both distinguishes between a number (ten) different senses of good (pp. 112-7) and points out that on his analysis, goodness will naturally have different senses ‘according to the pro-attitude in question’ (p. 183). 31 ‘Consequentialism’ in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991) and ‘The Consequentialist Perspective’ in Marcia Baron, Philip Pettit & Michael Slote, Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).

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it might be appropriate with a wide variety of attitudes and other responses, but then these are always derivatively appropriate, i.e. their aptness is due to their tendency to, in the end, promote the good. Unless Pettit would say that ‘promoting’ can be further specified in ways that can be understood as tied to different areas of application for ‘good’, and there seems to be no reason to think that he would claim this, his position is a clear-cut example of a strong unitarian approach to the good. The problem is just that such a position is not very plausible. Pettit’s only real argument is that it is a simple position and while simplicity is surely a virtue in philosophical theories, the point of Occam’s razor is surely lost if it is wielded like an axe. The virtue of simplicity quickly loses its luster if we are forced to adopt a number of highly artificial analyses to explain the way that we think and feel about the good in different circumstances. This is a point I have already argued in section 2.1 and Pettit is thus a good example of someone who understands value as supervening primarily on states of affairs. (ii) Weak unity thesis: Goodness is a single genus, although there are different species of it. As suggested above, this is probably how Brentano’s analysis is best understood. According to it, the essential feature of goodness is to be a worthy object of pro-attitudes, but different kinds of goodness differ as to what kinds of attitudes are appropriate in relation to that which is good in the relevant sense. For instance, for an object to have aesthetic goodness might make it worthy of admiration or contemplation while for something to be prudentially good might make it worthy of pursuit or desire. However, if Kant is correct, then moral goodness has a distinct normative element that it does not share with other forms of goodness, namely as having to do with the agent’s worthiness of happiness. Brentano’s analysis is certainly very flexible since the love of which he speaks covers many different concrete kinds of attitudes, but the one thing that responses grounded in the recognition of something as good must have in common is that they are capable of being understood as at least some form of pro-attitude. Yet, it is difficult to see how this can be done in the case of moral goodness without robbing it of what makes it what it is. The reason is that the essential feature of moral goodness, namely that it makes us worthy of happiness, cannot be understood as a specification of ‘being a worthy object of pro-attitudes.’ Thus, if Kant is right in his view on moral goodness, the weak unity thesis must be rejected. (iii) Weak disunity thesis: Goodness is not a single genus, but all forms of goodness still share in a particular normative property. This position means that while we accept that there is a general property common to all relevant forms of goodness, some forms of it are such that their normativity is not just not fully specified by this property: they are more complex. Take Kant’s view of moral goodness as an example. While, as noted above, its essential feature is to make us worthy of

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happiness, Kant would hardly claim that it is not a worthy object of pro-attitudes; there is probably nothing in the world, or even out of it, that is for him as worthy of having pro-attitudes directed towards it as is moral goodness. Thus, according to this interpretation of the Kantian position the distinctness of moral goodness is compatible with there being a single property common to all forms of goodness, it is just that all the differences that exist between these different kinds cannot be understood as mere specifications of this property. The problem with this position is that there are some forms of goodness that seem somewhat difficult to make room for even within this kind of slimmed-down Brentano-style analysis. The most obvious candidate is functional goodness, e.g. the goodness of a fine hammer or a well-functioning machine. The adherent of a Brentano-style analysis might of course say that when objects really do exemplify functional goodness, then they are also worthy of love. But is it natural to say so? Sure, a good hammer is nice to have around when I need one, but am I really supposed to have any kind of deeper appreciation of it than just plainly seeing it as a fine example of its kind? Possibly, ‘worthy’ can be understood in a weak sense, meaning only that if I form a pro-attitude towards a good object then it is appropriate, rather than the stronger reading which would mean that if something is good then I should form a pro-attitude towards it. Nevertheless, in the case of functional goodness there are some instances where even the weak interpretation seems clearly wrong. While we might find some useful objects worthy of certain pro-attitudes, some objects are such that we do not approve of their uses at all. A well-functioning thumbscrew might certainly be good as far as thumbscrews go, but can we reasonably say that it is a worthy object of a pro-attitude? One might possibly claim that the appropriate response to such an object is a mixed one, a certain admiration of its technical excellence is compatible with a sense of disgust with respect to its purpose. Still, to admire the functional excellence of a thumb-screw is to direct one’s mind towards something that is inherently tied to acts of torture; functional goodness in a thumb-screw does not have to do with it being a shiny show-piece of engineering and metallurgy, but with being an effective instrument of causing pain in a controlled manner. If we understand what it means for a thumbscrew to be a good example of its kind, what we must admire is precisely its ability to perform this very task, something that seems to be an unreasonable object of admiration. The example of the thumbscrew also suggests that this kind of goodness can hardly be understood as derivative since there is no goodness from which the goodness of the excellent thumbscrew can be traced. There is an end that some people see as valuable and to which one might think that the goodness of the excellent thumb-screw can be traced, but since the goodness of the thumb-screw is not dependent on this end being truly

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valuable it can hardly be understood as derived from such a value. If one nevertheless tries to maintain a Brentano-style understanding of goodness in the face of examples like this, then surely it is one’s philosophical pre-commitments, and not common sense, that are speaking. (iv) Strong disunity thesis: Goodness is not a single genus and there is no property in which all forms of goodness share. Of all the four positions outlined here this is naturally the one that is most difficult to argue against since there cannot be any specific counter-example to it. Furthermore, given the ubiquity of the word ‘good’ in everyday discourse and the extremely long stretch of time over which different uses of ‘good’ have been able to evolve it would perhaps even be quite surprising if under the surface complexity of everyday usage we were to find any interesting form of unity. Still, from a philosophical point of view this kind of resignation in the face of ordinary language would simply reduce the philosopher to a second-rate linguist at best. Thus, within a philosophical context I find it reasonable that this should not be the default position against which one must argue by example in order to abandon. Rather, we should be able to take a unity thesis as a philosophical default position and then the adherent of the strong disunity thesis should argue by example in order to move us towards this position. As already suggested there is such a case to be made, thus suggesting that this is nevertheless where we ought to land. Perhaps it is this kind of position that Brentano thinks of when speaking of an analogical unity of ‘good,’ but it remains to be seen whether the notion of ‘analogy’ is really of any use to understand these matters. Georg Henrik von Wright, who is an example of a proponent of the strong disunity thesis, considers the idea that ‘good’ might be an example of Wittgensteinian family resemblance, but although he does not reject such an interpretation as unreasonable he does so not see it as promising either.32 For present purposes it is however not important to go deeper into these matters, what is important is rather that there is a disunity of ‘good’ since the Kantian position that I seek to elaborate here presupposes that the notion of moral goodness is sui generis. It should however be noted that this is quite compatible with both weak and strong disunity and that even the strong disunity thesis, at least as understood here, is of course quite compatible with there being some property that many senses of ‘good’ share – thus even allowing that strong disunity is compatible with moral goodness not being a sui generis form of goodness. There are nevertheless, as pointed to above, good reasons to accept the strong disunity thesis and I suspect that the Kantian case is still somewhat strengthened by this fact since if we are convinced that goodness cannot be completely univocal because some other forms of goodness clearly cannot be

32 The Varieties of Goodness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 16-7.

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fitted into a Brentano-style analysis (which as far as I know is the only one flexible enough to be a serious contender on this matter), then our resistance to the idea that ‘morally good’ is sui generis is probably lessened since in that case we do not have an overarching unity of goodness anyway. Even so, it would perhaps have been fine if I could at this point produce some separate argument establishing that ‘morally good’ must be understood in the Kantian way. But one should remember what the project here is, namely not one of piecemeal conceptual analysis but one of descriptive metaphysics. Thus, what is at stake here is not so much to produce an item by item analysis of the key moral concepts, one that captures every nuance of how we use them in everyday discourse, but rather to discuss what a reasonable ontology of values would look like. As a piece of descriptive metaphysics such an ontology must of course take its cue from the way that we speak and think about such matters in everyday life, but it should also make sense as a whole. As already pointed out, what a descriptive metaphysician cannot do is to claim at any point that people in general are fundamentally mistaken. Kant might of course be wrong, but given the methodological approach utilized here the only real test there can be of the Kantian picture of moral goodness is to what extent the whole of which it is a part succeeds in rationalizing common sense morality as a whole. When attempting, within the framework of a descriptive metaphysics, to develop an ontology of values and norms the Kantian should say that there are at least two distinctions that must be drawn in order to map the domain of value. The first is between ethical and non-ethical value, where the former is of direct relevance to practical reasoning and the latter is not. Non-ethical value is probably divided into several different kinds of value, the division of which I will however not enter into here, although aesthetic value is certainly an important form of value. That a value is non-ethical does not mean that it cannot be ethically relevant, but that in order for it to become ethically relevant it must be related to some ethical value. The second distinction is between two kinds of ethical value, the prudential and the moral, which of course correspond to the two components of the highest good. I will have a little more to say about value in general in the next chapter, but for now at least this much can be said with certainty: the position that goodness is univocal in a strict sense presupposes that moral goodness is not regarded as a distinct form of goodness. Many thinkers in the Moorean tradition have taken precisely this position; even when they have been pluralists who recognized that a thing like virtue is good, they have seen it as yet another thing the existence of which is to be promoted. Thus, while one’s favored ethical theory might be pluralistic in the sense that it allows that many different things can be good, it would still be a monistic theory, in another sense, since they would be good in the same way. But if there is such a thing as a

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specifically moral kind of goodness, and at least common sense does seem to involve such an idea, then this form of monism is clearly a mistake.

2.5 Two Distinctions in Moral Theory

The kind of mistaken monistic view on the nature of value that Moore and Brentano are examples of might not always have been as explicitly set out by those who have adhered to it and not all have adhered to it; but unfortunately it was still an underlying idea of much 20th century moral philosophy. This can clearly be seen if we turn our attention to the way philosophers have tended to see what kind of issue is primarily at stake in normative ethics, something which can be appreciated by looking at the way ethical theories have been divided into main types. Two major distinctions have been used to draw the battle lines of 20th century normative ethics. The first is the distinction between teleological and deontological theories, which was first introduced by J. H. Muirhead33 and more recently explicated by John Rawls.34 The second is the distinction between consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories, which was first introduced by Elizabeth Anscombe.35 If we begin with the first distinction, it is quite clear that someone like J. H. Muirhead only recognizes two ethical vocabularies, those of ‘right’ and ‘good’ respectively, and it was in the context of such an outlook that the distinction between teleological and deontological ethical theories was formulated, the idea being that there are two basic kinds of ethical theories, those that, like the utilitarians and the British idealists, accord primacy to the good, and those, like Bishop Butler, Kant, and W. D. Ross, who do not. Accordingly, Muirhead understands concepts like ‘virtue’ and ‘worth’ as falling in the same category as all other concepts of ‘good’. Now, it is of course possible that these concepts will not have any significant status in the definitive ethical theory, but surely that is a matter which must be resolved at a later stage, not settled at the beginning of inquiry by an attempt to push all ethical theories into two neatly distinct categories. At the very least, Kant’s contrast between moral goodness and prudential goodness should be taken seriously at the outset of investigation. More often than not, such investigation simply proceeds as if the prudentially good is what good in general is about. Rawls differs from Muirhead to the extent

33 The distinction is explicitly set out in his short monograph Rule and End in Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), although it is clearly anticipated in his earlier textbook The Elements of Ethics, 3rd Ed. (London: John Murray, 1910). 34 A Theory of Justice, pp. 24-5. 35 ‘Modern Moral Philosophy,’ p. 36.

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that he does recognize that there are three main conceptual families in ethics, concepts of value, right, and moral worth respectively, but he also concludes that ‘[t]he two main concepts of ethics are those of the right and the good; the concept of a morally worthy person is, I believe, derived from them. The structure of an ethical theory is, then, largely determined by how it defines and connects these two basic notions.’36 Based on this, not surprisingly, Rawls sees two main kinds of theory. There are teleological theories where ‘the good is defined independently from the right, and then the right is defined as that which maximizes the good’37 and there are deontological theories that ‘either does not specify the good independently from the right, or does not interpret the right as maximizing the good’.38 Given this outlook, Kant is clearly a deontologist, as is the traditional way of seeing him. But at the same time, philosophers like Aristotle and F. H. Bradley, both of whom would at first sight seem to be prime examples of a teleological approach, become difficult to place satisfactorily. The reason is that both of them specify the human good in terms of concepts that are moral to their character – in Aristotle’s case it is the virtues that are regarded as constitutive parts of eudaimonia39 and in Bradley’s case there is the prominence he gives to the duties belonging to one’s station in his delineation of what is involved in human self-realization.40 So, are utilitarians the only teleologists and is the difference between Kant and Aristotle negligible? The answer will of course depend on the direction from which one approaches the matter, but one thing is certainly clear: Kant himself saw his ethical theory as radically different from eudaimonism. The problem with Rawls is that in spite of all his sympathies for Kant he is still so very swift in pushing the concept of moral worth41 to the side even if it is 36 Ibid., p. 24. 37 Ibid., p. 24. 38 Ibid., p. 30. 39 NE 1098a17-19. For a discussion of this, see Gregory Velazco y Trianosky, ‘What is Virtue Ethics all About?’, American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1990), who distinguishes between teleological and deontological virtue ethics (where Aristotle is an example of the latter on account of the fact that he understands the virtues as constitutive parts of happiness). 40 See especially ‘My Station and its Duties’ in Ethical Studies, 2nd Ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927). It should perhaps be pointed out that although Bradley’s name is usually strongly identified with the somewhat parochial morality of this essay, it is immediately followed by an essay, called ‘Ideal Morality’, that adds a cosmopolitan element to Bradley’s theory. However, even if this latter essay modifies Bradley’s position, it is still clear that the fulfillment of one’s social duties is seen by him as an important element in self-realization. 41 In order to avoid any misunderstandings it should be pointed out that Kant does not have any distinction between ‘worth’ and ‘value’, he just uses ‘Wert’ throughout. English translators do however vary, depending on the context, between rendering ‘Wert’ as ‘worth’ or ‘value’.

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obvious that it is a concept that is of central importance to Kant.42 Kant does not merely differ from teleologists, e.g. utilitarians, in that he does not specify the good independently of the right, he conceives value in an altogether different way and therefore any attempt to simply read his ethical theory as an answer to a contemporary question is doomed to misrepresent him. A Kantian like Korsgaard follows Rawls in claiming that there are three main ethical conceptual categories: ‘the rightness or justice of actions, policies, and institutions; the goodness of objects, purposes, lives, etc.; and the moral worth or moral goodness of characters, dispositions, or actions.’43 One might perhaps think that Korsgaard, who is clearly interested in formulating a theory that lies close to Kant himself, would not neglect the third category, but when she declares where her interest lies, then it is with the second category: ‘the kind of goodness that marks a thing out as worthy of choice.’44 As already noted, the one thing that Kant grants value without qualification is something that falls in the third category. Of course, this does not mean that Korsgaard must fail in her efforts, although as we have seen there is reason to think that she does, but it is evident that she will fail to provide a theory of value that is able to make sense of the pivotal role played by moral goodness in Kant’s ethical thought. If we turn to the second distinction, the one between consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories, it is quite clearly devised to be of use in the debate over utilitarianism and its extended family. Here it is more difficult to find canonical statements of what consequentialism is, especially since the person who introduced the notion used it in a way that is clearly different from how it tends to be used now,45 but essentially a consequentialist position is one which traces the rightness of actions to the impartial betterness of consequences.46 Since non-consequentialism is essentially an anti-utilitarian camp (in contemporary ethical theory consequentialism can probably be seen as the ghost of utilitarianism), philosophers like Kant, Aristotle, and Bradley do not sit as ill

42 Rawls is however quite clear about the centrality of the good will in Kant’s moral theory in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 154-56. 43 ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness,’ p. 249. 44 Ibid., p. 249. 45 Anscombe’s view of consequentialism is that it stands opposed to the idea that there are moral absolutes. Again, we can see how the way in which one draws the main battle line of ethics reveals more about the theorist drawing the distinction than about ethics as such. While Anscombe takes moral absolutism very seriously most philosophers do not and so they see no problem in lumping together moral absolutism with theories like that of W. D. Ross (while Anscombe saw the difference between Ross and someone like Sidgwick as negligible). 46 Although this tracing might take paths that run through rules or motives of the agent.

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together when lumped together there. On the other hand, it is still yet another way of forgetting about the important role that might quite reasonably be accorded to the concept of moral worth. Furthermore, this distinction shares with the first one a common presumption about the essence of ethical theory, namely as focused on the question of what we ought to do. The task at hand then becomes focused on formulating a criterion of rightness (or perhaps a decision procedure). It seems quite fair to say that this view on ethical theory has, at least during the main part of the 20th century, been philosophical orthodoxy. It also seems to be a key element behind the idea that there is such a thing as applied ethics, the very notion of which implies that not only can philosophers discuss practical ethical issues but that they are, at least ideally, in possession of a kind of theory that can be applied somewhat like physicists can apply their theories and construct lunar shuttles (or whatever). This kind of understanding of the point of ethical theory is easily projected across the works of historical writers and Kant is certainly not uninterested in matters of right and wrong. Nevertheless, to simply interpret the Categorical Imperative as a criterion of moral rightness would be highly deceptive. We should not lose sight of the fact that the Categorical Imperative pertains not to actions, but to maxims. It is a criterion, yes, but it is a criterion by which we judge the principles according to which we act, not the actions themselves. It should be readily admitted that Kant himself makes it easy for us to lose sight of this since he fluctuates between judging maxims, judging persons, and judging actions. Yet, if we focus on the fact that the Categorical Imperative is a test of maxims, we will undoubtedly see that it is not an especially effective test of actions. For those thinking that the business of moral philosophy is to give us an algorithm of right action, and accordingly to partake in generating new moral knowledge about how to act in a diversity of circumstances, the Categorical Imperative is surely a let-down and Kant’s own excursions, in the Metaphysics of Morals, into more practical issues must seem lackadaisical at best. But is it Kant that is giving a poor answer or these people who are asking an inappropriate question or approaching a reasonable question in an exaggerated way? It should be pointed out that the view that ethics is essentially about the question of rightness is one that has become increasingly challenged over the last few years. Today, many philosophers take their cue from Socrates and believe that the basic question of ethics is one about how we ought to live.47 From a Kantian perspective, this kind of shift is a step forward, but also a step that might lead to an eudaimonist approach; and while it might be true that eudaimonism is the

47 See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), Chapter 1.

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classical way of seeing things, it is also a position from which Kant explicitly distances himself. In contrast to the eudaimonist aspiration to tell us about where our happiness lies and to include morality as a part of happiness, Kant’s suggestion is that morals is ‘the introduction to a science that teaches, not how we are to become happy, but how we are to become worthy of happiness’ (TP 278), which is certainly a way of thinking that lies closer to the Socratic model than to the ideal of delivering a criterion of rightness, but which nevertheless stand for a distinct approach. What lesson should we draw from these remarks? One is that attempts at categorizing ethical theories are rarely, if indeed ever, innocent. They regularly involve assumptions with respect to which certain theories will simply look awkward and, thus, the question is begged against them. The other is that Kant’s ethical theory is distinct in a way that makes it inappropriate to simply subsume it under some generic category like ‘deontological’. For Kant the category of moral goodness is of pivotal importance both in the sense that he sees it as essentially different from other kinds of goodness and in that he sees the very point of morality as inextricably tied up with it. Since this distinctness of Kantianism is not always appreciated, not even by modern-day Kantians,48 this also means that the potential of Kant’s ethical thought has not yet been fully explored. Irrespective of what we in the end think about what it can yield, it would therefore still be a sound idea to try taking seriously Kant’s idea that morality is about making us worthy of happiness. If nothing else, we might follow him a bit down that road and see where it leads.

2.6 Kant and the Highest Good

While Kant does open the Groundwork with his striking remarks about the unqualified value of the good will, and certainly returns to the matter at times, it is still a part of his thinking that is not given its proper setting until the second chapter of the Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason in the second Critique. It is there that Kant gives his lengthiest exposition of the doctrine of the highest good. Kant claims that the highest good has two parts: (i) virtue, and (ii) happiness in proportion to virtue. Together they constitute the highest good in the sense that the person who has both of them is not lacking in anything, i.e. together they constitute the complete human good. Not that this is a very informative position since we have been told precious little about what constitutes happiness, which is that thing which most analyses of the summum

48 Although see Barbara Herman, ‘Leaving Deontology Behind,’ The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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bonum try to spell out. But then again, Kant’s analysis of the highest good is not supposed to be informative, at least not in the sense that Aristotle’s is, the point is rather to explicate the difference between his position and the kind of eudaimonism which he sees as prevalent among other ethical theorists. As is well-known to Kant’s readers, his emphasis on morality as conditioning the value of one’s happiness is not just about the importance of us acting in accordance with morality. Moral goodness requires something more, namely that we act out of morality, or to put it in Kant’s own terms, out of duty. The problem is just that if virtue requires a neurotic preoccupation with the idea of doing one’s duty, the Kantian picture of the moral life will become a highly unattractive one.49 Even if we accept Kant’s view of morality as making us worthy of happiness, would we not be prone to say that a person who throughout her life unreflectively simply acts in accordance with the precepts of morality would still be worthy of happiness? Surely it cannot be required that one must explicitly keep thinking about one’s duties round the clock. The idea that Kantian ethics embraces an unreasonably strong presence of the motive of duty in our motivations does however get most of its fuel from a few passages in the beginning of the Groundwork rather than from the discussion of virtue and the highest good in the second Critique. But if we see both works as expressing the same basic idea of the centrality of moral goodness, then it would seem reasonable to read the beginning of the Groundwork in the light of the later development of Kant’s views in the second Critique and the Religion,50 although since the Groundwork was written before these works and sets the agenda for them it does still seem a good place to start. On the matter of the good will it seems reasonable to say that the will can be good in at least two important senses. To begin with there is the most obvious sense, namely that when I will something I might do so in a morally appropriate manner or not, and in the former case my will is good. But if we are interested in moral goodness as a component of the highest good, we would like to have an understanding of it as a general characteristic of an agent rather than as something that one can be at one moment and fail to be in the next. And even in the Groundwork Kant is clearly concerned with the overall moral quality of individuals (G 397, 399). This naturally brings us to the second sense in which the will can be said to be good 49 This is, of course, a version of the familiar point made by writers like Michael Stocker, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), and Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’ in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 50 Especially since the kind of criticism that is directed against Kant on this matter is not new; Schiller formulated a version of it already in Kant’s lifetime and Kant explicitly mentions and responds to Schiller in one passage of the latter work (R 18-9n).

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and which has to do with something like the basic disposition of a person, something to which Kant refers in the Religion as Gesinnung (R 20-1). To have a good Gesinnung is to have a moral frame of mind, it involves a deep resolve not to let one’s personal inclinations move one to act contrary to the moral law. Given that the importance of virtue in our lives is about it being a condition for the value of our happiness it would also seem appropriate that we focus on the person as a whole, not just on momentary choices. Naturally, if we want to judge a person as a whole, and in general the persons we are to judge are ourselves, we would then look at how this person has willed over the course of her life and then say something about the overall character of her will.51 On the second reading of what having a good will is essentially about, there is no obvious place for ideas about the centrality of occurrent thoughts about duty propelling the agent forward. Rather, if we look at what is important for Kant, and what should be important for Kantians in general, it is that true moral goodness is principled. The focus does accordingly not lie on what is going on in the foreground of our deliberations but on what lies in the depths of our hearts. We should follow F. H. Bradley in distinguishing between principles that are in one’s mind and those that are before one’s mind.52 To be motivated in the sense that Kant is interested in is thus not about having the thought of duty hovering in one’s deliberative field of vision, but rather that the fundamental principles underlying one’s deliberations involve a firm commitment to living and choosing in accordance with the dictates of morality, i.e. it is a matter of a moral resolve rather than a moralistic fixation. Now, it is certainly a matter of debate to what extent the concept of the highest good is an important one or not in Kant’s moral philosophy as a whole. 51 As is familiar to readers of Kant his attitude when it comes to judging persons as wholes involves some metaphysically quite radical ideas, namely that we view a person’s phenomenal character as the product of a single noumenal choice. Following Karl Ameriks, ‘Kant on the Good Will’ in Otfried Höffe (ed.), Grundlegung zue Metaphysik der Sitten: Ein kooperativer Kommentar (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), I think we can distinguish between two ways in which we can understand what Ameriks calls the ‘whole character’ view (p. 54), that moral goodness is an overall characteristic of an agent. On the first version, which can perhaps make sense if we stress the idea about a single noumenal choice of character, we are either all good or not good at all. On the second version, moral goodness is something we have given that we have achieved a sufficient degree of moral quality of character. Ameriks tends towards the latter view as an interpretation of Kant, and as such it might be difficult to reconcile with all that Kant has to say on the matter, but if our interest is to construct a reasonable Kantian position it is quite clear that it the best candidate of the two. 52 Ethical Studies, 2nd Ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 195. For a similar distinction, although framed in terms of the role of desire in deliberation, see Philip Pettit & Michael Smith, ‘Backgrounding Desire’, The Philosophical Review 99 (1990).

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Kant himself obviously finds it of the highest importance, although one reason for this is surely that it is an essential part of his attempt to provide a rational ground for religious belief. Still, those who wish to argue that the doctrine of the highest good is not important must do so from grounds independent of Kant’s own views and the idea that the notion of the highest good is an unimportant one is surely colored by what one takes the subject matter of ethics to be. If one thinks that it is an inquiry into the question of which actions are right then the doctrine of the highest good is simply an unnecessary add-on. What is important then is clearly the Categorical Imperative and the question of how maxims should be formulated, rather than Kant’s not entirely convincing attempts to justify the belief in God. However, Kant’s own project is more ambitious than this. As already pointed out he seems to think that the matter of ascertaining what to do is not an important philosophical concern; not because it is not important per se, but because it is something that we are already competent at. Rather, his project is to make sense of morality, to demonstrate that it has a substance that goes beyond mere custom and to show how morality fits into a more general picture of the world; and in this attempt at formulating a complete world-view, the doctrine of the highest good might even be said to serve as the keystone.53 Though sympathetic to Kant, I must say that I find it difficult to take seriously the Kantian project in all its breadth, or at the very least I find it impossible to attempt an elucidation of it in this work. But at the same time, I cannot say that I have ever seen anything that has convinced me to take seriously the idea that philosophy can settle real-life moral quandaries. Accordingly, even if I know of no definitive way to lay down once and for all ‘what ethics is really about’, I cannot for myself find anything for it to be about except to say something about the light in which we should generally see moral matters and the general stance we should have in relation to others. If ethics is understood in this way, then for a Kantian approach to ethics the doctrine of the highest good will be important since it is there that Kant gives a picture of how morality and the pursuit of personal happiness fit together. It is a plain fact that among those Kantians who attempt to ‘modernize’ Kant’s theory the notion of the highest good is one of those features that are 53 The wide impact of the doctrine of the highest good is not seen if one merely focuses on the second Critique; but if one takes into account the turn the critical project takes in the third Critique, especially in the Critique of Teleological Judgment, and also the way Kant in some of his more popular essays understands human history, it becomes hard to underestimate the importance of the highest good. For an example of a contemporary Kantian who brings out how Kant’s moral philosophy is fitted into this wider picture, see Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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regularly lost in the modernization process. There are several reasons that make this quite understandable, although to do without the notion of the highest good ultimately still amounts to a serious loss for the project of Kantian ethics. What binds these reasons together is that they have to do with a failure to separate out what is philosophically interesting in Kant’s ideas about the highest good from that which is part of his attempt to incorporate Christianity into his philosophy. I realize of course that the very idea of such a separation runs counter to Kant’s own intentions, but there are still good reasons to go through with it. One is that for an ethical theory to be taken seriously today it must be formulated in a strictly secular way. Another is that precisely those parts that are the most objectionable about the highest good have to do with Kant’s attempt to align his moral theory with Christianity. So, what are these problems, then? The first has to do with his way of justifying the practical postulates of God and immortality. Given the contingencies of life in the empirical world, it seems reasonable to assume that we will not achieve the kind of proportionality that is called for in the highest good, especially not if we are to aim for the conjunction of full virtue and full happiness. Kant thus introduces the idea that we must think of our lives as continuing eternally so that we might be able to conceive of our lives as infinitely approximating true virtue (CPrR 114-19). But what kind of existence does Kant have in mind here? If it is supposed to be infinite then it would presumably have to break beyond the bounds of the empirical world, but since it is our embodiment, our very belonging to this world, that makes it impossible for us to achieve true virtue, it would seem that the idea of moral progress only makes sense within the precise circumstances where it cannot be infinite. Additionally, our potential for happiness is tied up with our embodiment. A pure will, what Kant calls a ‘holy will’, would not have any inclinations and while incapable of being anything but moral, it would thus also be incapable of achieving happiness. The ideal of the highest good would accordingly be an appropriate ideal only within the confines of the empirical world, i.e. human existence as we know it. Kant’s reason for introducing the postulates seems to be that we cannot aim at the highest good if it is not realizable and while there is perhaps a sense in which this is true, it does still seem that the highest good can play the role of a regulative ideal in our lives even if we will never be able to achieve it perfectly. A second problem is that, once the idea of God is introduced in this way, it might seem as if Kant introduces an element of heteronomy since it might sound as if the moral life must hold the promise of happiness in order for morality to be justified in our eyes. I think that Kant is innocent of this since our postulation of God presupposes that we are already moral. It is not intended to, and indeed cannot even be intelligibly used that way, serve in coaxing the immoral into

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becoming moral. Still, the introduction of God into the theory might mislead us into understanding the Kantian notion of desert in an inappropriate way. Although Christian thought is multifaceted, I would still say that traditionally the idea of God is connected with a spectator-centered notion of desert: our judge is an external one and we strive to satisfy this external judge so that he might reward us. The question put by an agent living under such a judge is ‘How should I be in order to become worthy of having happiness bestowed upon me?’ But what Kant stands for, with his emphasis on our autonomy, is rather an agent-centered notion of desert. The question the Kantian agent puts to herself is ‘How should I be in order to be worthy of the happiness that I may gain if I succeed in my pursuits?’ – it is a question put in the midst of my pursuit of happiness, not antecedently to it with respect to an afterlife. I suspect that one reason why someone might find it dubitable to understand moral goodness as ‘worthiness to be happy’ might be that such a position seems to underwrite a judgmental attitude towards others, as if we are constantly to monitor the level of their virtue and measure it against the level of their happiness, perhaps even try to lower the latter if the former is lacking. To assume such an attitude towards others would be to assume what has traditionally been understood as the business of God and it is probably a move that comes natural if we think in terms of the spectator-oriented approach to desert for which God stands.54 I would not venture as far as saying that the agent-centered notion of desert is incompatible with the postulate of the existence of God, but since the presence of God might mislead us into missing the real nature of the Kantian approach to desert, I do still find that to remove God from the theory does in this context serve the purpose of increasing the clarity in a Kantian theory of ethics. If to be moral is to be as if one were a member of a Kingdom of Ends and if, as suggested in section 2.1, the Kingdom of Ends is an ideal realm where everybody are moral, then to live as if one were a member of that realm is to live as if everybody were moral, and thus worthy of happiness, even if they in actuality are not.55 This does not mean that we cannot help people to become

54 Though if one has such a view one might find it completely inappropriate for us to take a judgmental attitude towards others since we are at such a radical epistemic disadvantage compared with God. 55 Given this view, since the ‘as if being moral’ way of viewing a person is a component of the moral frame of mind, there is an asymmetry between oneself and others in the following way: oneself is the only individual which one cannot properly relate to as a moral being without actually being moral, i.e. oneself is the only individual which one cannot properly relate to as worthy of happiness without actually being worthy of happiness (since it is only when one already is moral that the ‘as if’-stance is legitimate).

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moral if they want our help, that we must instead pretend that they already are, but it does mean that ultimately the judge which everyone has to face, when it comes to the question of one’s moral worth, is oneself. Indeed, Kant is very clear about the essential moral asymmetry between oneself and others, for instance when he maintains that the two ends that are also duties ‘are one’s own perfection and the happiness of others’ (MM 385). Naturally, even if I am not to view myself as the supreme moral judge of others, they still have to face themselves and from their perspective the same kind of essential asymmetry is in place with respect to me. Now, I will have more to say about both the pursuit of happiness and how to become worthy of happiness (and in this context the latter means: how to become able to properly understand oneself as being worthy of happiness) in the two final chapters; but in order to be able to explicate these matters I will, however, first have to develop a picture of the metaphysics of the person and this is something that I will try to do over the course of the following two chapters. Since the kind of picture that I am after is one that accords a pivotal place to the normative as a defining characteristic of the kind of life-world that one occupies as a person, I would like to start with some more general considerations concerning the existence of value, ethical or otherwise, and how it can be fitted into a world which can easily be seen as inherently dead in terms of normativity. This will also enable us to see more clearly the importance of having a metaphysics of a person, since, as we shall see, if we want to take the existence of values in the world seriously, it is in the metaphysics of the person that values have to be anchored.

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3. Values and the Fabric of the World

We may and should explain all products and events of nature, even the most purposive, so far as in our power lies, on mechanical lines – and it is impossible for us to assign the limits of our powers when confined to the pursuit of inquires of this kind. But in so doing we must never lose sight of the fact that among such products there are those which we cannot even subject to investigation except under the conception of an end of reason. These, if we respect the essential nature of our reason, we are obliged, despite those mechanical causes, to subordinate in the last resort to causality according to ends. – Critique of Judgement, 415

In an attempt to briefly characterize the difference between ancient and modern moral philosophy, Christine Korsgaard suggests that while the ancients thought that values were more real than the things which surround us, and the philosophical mystery was to explain why the world is characterized by change and imperfection, we moderns have a completely different view, ‘the world has been turned inside out,’1 the mystery now is how values can be intelligibly fitted into the world at all. Korsgaard’s picture certainly captures something, but it might be fleshed out by noting another important difference, namely in views on causality. One great transmutation of thinking that characterizes the passage to modernity was the change from an understanding of causality that was predominately telic to one that was mechanical. To a large extent this was a change that had to do with the way we explain natural occurrences, but it was also a change that affected the way that the human will was dealt with in moral philosophy and with which problems were considered to be the central ones with respect to it. I do not have the space here to argue my point, although I do think such an argument could be made, but for ancient philosophy the key problem about the will was that of weakness of will and this was only natural because given a telic notion of causality it becomes a mystery why we fail to be drawn towards the good. (Indeed, given a picture of the world as a telic order, it is striking how we human beings seem to be alone in so consistently failing to exist in accordance with our telos.) For modern philosophy, the key problem about the will has been that of freedom of the will and this is only natural because

1 Sources of Normativity, p. 4.

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given a mechanical conception of causality, which is backward-looking, a discrepancy is introduced between how we understand the causes of action and the forward-looking mode in which we deliberate about how to act. In modern moral philosophy we thus have two mysteries, of value and freedom respectively, which both involve an inconsistency between the way that we experience our situation, namely that there are values and that we are free, and the picture of the world painted by the modern scientific world-view. While there are many moral philosophers who discuss the mystery of value and many who discuss the mystery of freedom, and even some who discuss both of them, although usually as separate issues, I would suggest that what characterizes the Kantian approach is that it treats these two mysteries as fundamentally conjoined. Thus, in what might be called the Kantian gambit, the pieces are positioned in a way that invites us to try to unlock two of the most fundamental problems of moral philosophy at the same time. I will start by looking at values; this will naturally lead over into a discussion of freedom, and then I will attempt to outline an account that secures a reasonable place in the natural world for both values and freedom.

3.1 Moorean Objectivism and the Naturalist Challenge

Looking at the way we talk about values, it is striking how we often seem to talk about them much in the same way that we talk about plain objects like rocks, trees, and stars. When we talk like this, it is not just a question of occasional lapses where we mindlessly babble on as if values are really there in the way that rocks, trees, and stars are. Our talk is situated within a web of practices and beliefs that involve constant affirmations of the independence of values. Thus, if we are misguided in the way that we talk, we would seem to be fundamentally misguided. That we are misguided is the position of J. L. Mackie, and though there are few philosophical adherents to his position, its very possibility certainly sets a significant philosophical challenge.2 But given that we do talk about, and experience, values as if they are simply ‘out there’, one possibility that should be taken seriously is that this is because values actually are ‘out there’ in some ontologically respectable sense. As noted already in the previous chapter, G. E. Moore is probably the philosopher who has made the most notable attempt at providing a conceptual gloss on this common picture. Although he hardly regarded all values as truly robust, something that I suppose very few people do, he did identify a special category of supremely robust values: the intrinsic, i.e. a

2 Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). This position is usually referred to as ‘the error theory’.

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kind of value that is completely independent on anything outside the object which has the value. This does not mean that such values are part of the world in quite the same way as other properties, rather value is said to be a non-natural property that supervenes on the natural.3 Certainly, there does seem to be something special about values since unlike other properties, such as ‘flat’ and ‘round’, they are normative, i.e. they make certain patterns of behavior appropriate and others inappropriate. Of course, Moore is unable to give the least bit of proof for the real existence of any intrinsic values; but since we probably want to believe in them, we might perhaps be satisfied if it is an intelligible and coherent position. Accordingly, we should not be surprised to find someone like Mackie attempting not to disprove it, but to make it hard for us to believe in it. His most well-known attack goes under the name of ‘the argument from queerness’. It has two parts: one metaphysical, which is centered on the claim that ‘if there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe,’ and one epistemological, which is centered on the claim that ‘if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.’4 If we begin with the metaphysical side of the problem, the queerness of values has to do with the combination of an existence that is independent of us and their authoritative prescriptivity, i.e. that they makes demands on us. Other things operate on us through causal mechanisms, so there is nothing peculiar in there being an interaction between us and features ‘out there’ in the world, but these other features can hardly be understood as making demands on us. Gravitation does not ask us to remain on the ground. If we move to the epistemological part of the problem, it is quite obvious that even though they are clearly responsive to the natural features of the world, other animals do not recognize values, nor do many humans, e.g. infants. Somewhere along the line, both collectively as an evolving species, and individually as psychologically developing persons, we apparently attain the ability to do so. But what kind of ability is this? If values really are, as Mackie 3 Moore himself does not use the actual notion of ‘supervenience’, although there are many passages that indicate that it is still a Moorean notion, e.g.: ‘It is impossible that of two exactly similar things one should possess [value] and the other not, or that one should possess it in one degree, and the other in a different one’, ‘The Conception of Intrinsic Value’, p. 261. 4 Ibid., p. 38. This is one of two arguments that Mackie presents against objectivism; the other is an argument from relativity, which simply consists in pointing to the great diversity in conceptions of values and norms: if there were a realm of values with which we were in touch, human beings should be more in agreement about these matters than we actually are.

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puts it, part of the fabric of the world,5 then to attain this ability must be something like acquiring a sixth sense. Indeed, as discussed in the previous chapter, Moore suggests a way of discovering whether something has what he calls intrinsic value, the method of absolute isolation. Aside from the fact that this procedure does not seem apt even given Moore’s framework (Kant’s method of combination is clearly superior), the very idea of such a procedure revealing truths about values, rather than just clarifying our attitudes, seems to presuppose that we have the ability simply to intuit value. One might perhaps think that the objectivist can always drop this kind of intuitionist epistemic device. His is, after all, a thesis about ontology, and epistemic devices need not form an integral part of his theory: the question of which things are part of the fabric of the world is one thing, the question about how we best learn about the contents of the world is another. Still, if the objectivist cannot specify some way in which we can get in touch with this realm of objective values, then it becomes unclear what role they can play in our lives. Additionally, not only are intrinsic values mysterious, they hardly seem necessary in order to explain such phenomena as morality.6 One might put forward good socio-psychological reasons why we start thinking that there are values out there. On the collective side of the matter, it would seem to be a useful fiction in the maintenance of social order, while on the individual side we are socialized into thinking this way. This is of course a far too simplistic picture, but it does give an idea of the kind of explanation one could give and whichever way it may turn out in the end, something that is an empirical matter, the gist of such a picture is simple: valuings are an inherent part of human life, but we do not need to assume the antecedent existence of values in order to explain that fact. Call this the naturalist conclusion. On this picture, naturalism amounts to the position that the fabric of the world is a fabric of causal relations. Thus, if anything is to earn its place in the fabric of the world, it must do so by it being shown how it plays a causal role in the world or, at the very least, how it is explicable in causal terms. Indeed, the very idea of ‘the world’ suggests a hanging-togetherness that the notion of causality can be used to explain: the world forms a whole by its parts being bound together through a web of causal interactions. It might be noted that on this account, someone like Aristotle would count as a naturalist; it is just that he has a thicker conception of the fabric of the world on account of having a notion of telic causality in his ontological repertoire. One could of course further strengthen the notion of naturalism by saying that a naturalist position should

5 Ibid., p. 15. 6 Cf. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 30-5.

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not involve anything but a mechanical notion of causality since anything else is mere superstition. However, while it might certainly be the case that the very idea of telic causality is simply superstitious, would it still not be better to say that the picture of the world which includes only mechanical causality is a superior form of naturalism rather than to build this notion of causality into the very concept of naturalism? If nothing else, it would seem to be a bit presumptuous to say in advance of our investigations into the world exactly how it must be causally structured. This account also makes room for a modest ontological respectability even for some qualitative properties, e.g. secondary properties like colors, due to the fact that they ride piggyback on ascertainable causal processes. However, even this modest ontological respectability presupposes that we can form some idea about the underlying causal processes and the problem about fitting values into the fabric of the world in any ontologically respectable sense is that, unlike colors, they have no causal story to ride piggyback on. Hence the mystification of values involved in Mooreanism. Of course, we do have the possibility to tell certain causal stories about values, it is just that they will be biological, psychological, and sociological stories about our evaluative practices and these accounts seem to rob values of their special authoritative prescriptivity. Thus, we seem to be faced with a dilemma: either we insist on the authority of values, but end up mystifying them, or we demystify values, but end up deauthorizing them. Of course, philosophers cannot resist dilemmas like this: is it not conceivable that we can give an account of values that renders them demystified and yet with their authority intact? There would not seem to be any conceptual impossibility in doing so and it is, accordingly, the project that I intend to pursue here. But before doing so, I would like to delineate a few features that a satisfactory account of values should make sense of: (i) The practicality of values. Recognizing that something is valuable is not like recognizing that something is yellow. The latter is something one might simply note; values are something that is essentially normative. Whether we choose to understand normativity as some grand sui generis phenomenon or simply in terms having to do with desires and the like, the fact remains that normative matters would seem to have some essential connection with the affective and/or the conative. (ii) The external ‘feel’ of values. While we might feel in our breasts the impact of the values we recognize, this recognition is usually directed away from ourselves. Thus, even if we argue that our coming to recognize values is a process which springs from things having to do more with ourselves than with the world as such, we should be able to say something that makes sense of the fact that our attention is still directed towards the world.

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(iii) The descriptive structure of moral argument. As already noted, when we talk about normative matters, we at least talk as if we ascribe certain properties to things in the world. If we attempt to account for (ii) in a way that really involves some properties ‘out there’ in the world this part should be fairly unproblematic; we should be able to read what might be called ‘the ethical proposition’7 as having descriptive purport. If we attempt to do otherwise, for instance to understand the ethical proposition as expressing conative or affective attitudes, we need to make sense of the way we talk and argue about normative matters in some other way.8 (iv) The intersubjective validity of values. When we are convinced that something is of value, then we tend to find that there is something wrong about others if they do not come to see things our way (alternatively there might be something wrong about us, although if we are convinced about a normative matter this will just be something that we might recognize as a possibility and hardly our preferred explanation of the disagreement).9 (v) The sense of discovery with respect to values. When one comes to change one’s mind about matters of value, one tends to experience this reaching of a new view as making a discovery, i.e. of coming to recognize a value that was already there, waiting to be recognized. One such important pattern of thought is that most of us have ideas about moral progress that, at least implicitly, involve a conception of an independent standard against which changes in evaluative outlooks can be measured. For example, we would probably want to say that slavery is simply wrong and that it was wrong even before we thought it was wrong. When people

7 Cf. Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Chapters 3-4. 8 The main difficulty with non-descriptivist analyses of value statements is the problem to account for what is often called ‘embedded uses,’ i.e. such uses of value terms that are non-assertive to their nature. It is for instance part of our moral practices that we often reason hypothetically, sometimes even deductively. Since such embedded uses of value terms cannot in any easily explicable way be understood as expressing emotions or issuing prescriptions and since the structure of these reasonings is such that they presuppose that the meanings of the value terms involved are constant throughout, it does seem as if our actual use of value terms has descriptive purport. Those who persist in their non-descriptivism might of course invent ways of understanding embedded uses, for a good example see Allan Gibbard, ibid., Chapter 5, but all such attempts will involve taking a decisive leap from trying to understand how we actually do use value terms, which is what I think non-descriptivists originally tried to do, to something very different, the exact point of which remains unclear. 9 Mackie actually distinguishes between objectivity of values and intersubjectivity of values and clearly states that his argument is only meant to establish that values are not objective (ibid., p. 22); but on the other hand, he simply views intersubjectivity as actual agreement between subjects. I see no point in defining in advance exactly how intersubjective validity is to be understood, but it can definitely mean more than merely actual agreement.

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changed their minds about slavery that was a change from incorrect to correct beliefs, similar to when people went from thinking of the Earth as flat to it being round. To a certain extent, these features overlap; perhaps one might even think that most of them can be subsumed under the idea about the external ‘feel’ of value and that is probably correct, given that one understands this notion broadly. But it is still important to lay them out in this way since in trying to make sense of the phenomenology of values it is far too easy to interpret their external ‘feel’ in too narrow a way just so that one will be able to conclude that one’s favored theory is able to make sense of this external ‘feel’. The order in which I will proceed for the remainder of this chapter is the following: I begin by considering an approach that might be called quasi-Moorean projectivism, which I understand as an individualistic theory, i.e. one that tries to make sense of values by reference to how our individual evaluative attitudes work. It turns out that this approach has difficulties similar to those that I have already pointed out in Korsgaard’s theory of value. However, unlike Korsgaard, the quasi-Moorean projectivists have not really attempted to address this issue and, accordingly, I then turn to a discussion of her attempts to compensate for these deficiencies by grafting a Wittgensteinian theory of reasons to her theory of value. The upshot of this discussion is that Korsgaard seems to be correct in emphasizing the social dimension of normative matters, but that there also appears to be a problem in grafting such an emphasis onto a Kantian theory since Kantianism places such great importance on the freedom of the individual. I therefore take a look at the Kantian approach to freedom and elaborate an account of it that will not stand in the way of an understanding of normativity that emphasizes its social dimension. I then turn to a discussion of social constructivism with respect to normative matters and argue that such a position is superior to quasi-Moorean projectivism, but that it still suffers from some difficulties which call for another kind of approach.

3.2 Quasi-Moorean Projectivism

As we have seen, the natural world seems able to go on quite happily without any mysterious entities called ‘values’. This conclusion is not unsatisfactory from a purely scientific point of view, one from which we merely seek to explain what happens; but as human beings we tend to take these values seriously and perhaps, if we reach the naturalist conclusion, the ways in which we behave and talk about matters of value will actually be undermined. In the face of this some philosophers have adopted what is often called a projectivist stance, the basic idea of which is that the realm of values is some kind

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of quasi-world that we superimpose on the natural world and which through this act of superimposing attains enough of an ontological respectability in order for us to continue thinking and talking about values in the way that we do. The locus classicus of projectivism is a short passage in § 21 of the first appendix in Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, where he speaks about how taste, which ‘gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue’, has ‘a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.’ Few philosophers today talk about sentiments. They would probably rather talk about desires or preferences instead. Whichever way one puts it there is however one danger that has to be steered clear of and it has to do with the fact that an important part of the external ‘feel’ of values is that we tend to think of them as being part of the input rather than the output of our deliberative processes. Thus, if values are to be tied to preferences, then preferences must be understood as input into the deliberative process and we cannot, accordingly, simply understand preference as revealed preference in the way that economists tend to do. Still, that should probably not trouble us since it is precisely the phenomenology of valuing that we need to make sense of and the doctrine of revealed preferences is not meant to be a phenomenologically sensitive account at all. Now, what the projectivist must do is to add something to the pure naturalist story that makes sense of the external ‘feel’ that values have when we think about them as deliberators. This task might look daunting. After all, an important part of this external ‘feel’ is that we have a sense of independence concerning at least certain values. Just as the tree in the quad is supposed to be there even when we do not look at it, values are supposed to be there even if we happen to cease recognizing them or before we started to recognize them. But according to projectivism, even if it grants ‘in a manner’ a form of existence to values, this existence would seem to be completely dependent on the act of valuing. This seems to fit badly with the way we feel that important values would not lose their validity simply because we changed our minds. One approach, pioneered by Simon Blackburn, is to seize Moore’s notion of supervenience and try to show how a projectivist can legitimately use it.10 The basic idea of supervenience is that a valuable object keeps its intrinsic value as long as it keeps its intrinsic natural properties, and what Blackburn’s move amounts to is that the kind of projection that is involved when we value an

10 Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), Chapter 6. Blackburn actually claims that the projectivist can make better sense of supervenience than the Moorean, but that is something that we need not go into here.

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object spreads that value across all possible worlds in which the object exists, thus including those worlds where we do not value the object. This suggestion has recently been elaborated by Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen.11 They distinguish between the supervenience base and the constitutive ground of a value. While the supervenience base consists of those properties on which the value is superimposed, the constitutive ground contains the attitude responsible for the superimposing. What this means, is that my attitude is not a condition of the value in the sense that it features among the reasons why I find the object in question valuable. The fact that I value something is not a part of why I value it. This is why the value sticks with the object even in such possible worlds where I no longer have any kind of pro-attitude towards it. As can easily be seen, this kind of projectivism is framed in a quite different conceptual apparatus than Hume’s. In spite of the fact that it repudiates the strong objectivity ascribed to values by Moore, it still seeks to employ essential parts of the Moorean terminology and might thus actually be understood as providing us with a new way of looking at the archetypal Moorean situation that is featured in his method of absolute isolation, one that does much to demystify the scene. Rather than being a peculiar epistemic device, it becomes a schema of the ontic relation between subject and value. This might seem innocent enough, but I would suggest that the borrowing of this metaphysical terminology makes it sound as if these writers can grant values an air of ontological respectability that is not really backed up by the ontology at their disposal. Neat as the suggestion about projecting value over the whole set of relevant possible worlds is, I thus find it difficult not to simply see it as a form of philosophical sleight-of-hand. To begin with, it must be questioned whether the ‘projection’ metaphor is not simply inappropriate here. A flashlight or a movie-projector can certainly be said to project things onto the world, but it is quite obvious that we do not ‘gild or stain’ the world with values in that way. There are no magical value-beams emanating from our eyes. Thus, there is an obvious tension in the projectivist approach. On the one hand, there is a desire to present a scientifically respectable ontology; on the other hand, the desire to continue to speak as if one were a bona fide Moorean. Hume’s remark that moral sentiment ‘raises, in a manner, a new creation’ is surely suggestive, but the problem is that ‘in a manner’ must be cashed out and if projectivists are not prepared to back it up by some story about how we literally add something to the natural world, then they

11 ‘A Distinction in Value: Intrinsic and For its Own Sake’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (1999), pp. 36-37.

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have real philosophical work left to accomplish before they can earn the right to their metaphor. Blackburn tries to do this through his philosophy of language, trying to show how we can systematically talk as if values were objective (indeed, this is what ‘projection’ amounts to in his approach), but even if such a project can be carried out, something which remains to be shown, it would still not make phenomenological sense of the external ‘feel’ of values. When it comes to Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen they take their cue from Korsgaard’s thoughts about ‘sources of value’ and ‘conferring’ and claim that there is an ambiguity in her notion of ‘source of value’, an ambiguity they try to sort out by their distinction between supervenience base and constitutive ground. Now, I agree that there is a serious ambiguity in Korsgaard’s terminology, but I fail to see how this distinction sorts it out. The real ambiguity is between a literal and a circumlocutory reading of these notions. On the literal reading, there really is a metaphysical substance ‘value’ which has some kind of ‘source’ from which it can be ‘conferred’. On the circumlocutory reading, it is just a metaphysical-sounding way of expressing something that is not metaphysical, but rather a psychological phenomenon. Since Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen try to resolve the ambiguity in Korsgaard by giving us two metaphysical-sounding notions instead, they can only be said to aggravate the situation. In another paper, Rabinowicz has argued that the existence of values is something that makes sense only from within the internal perspective of the valuer and that transcendence destroys values.12 Yet, the very notion of ‘constitutive ground’, at least when used in a subjectivist model, presumes that we take a transcendent perspective, a perspective from which there, accordingly, is no value to be constituted. What we can speak about from the transcendent perspective is how a certain attitude involves the subject thinking that certain properties make an object valuable. But this also means that the whole story about projecting over possible worlds will at best amount to nothing more than a phenomenological description of what the valuer is doing – it is thus not anything that can be used to address worries about whether subjectivism undermines the phenomenology of valuing. And since we hardly start thinking about possible worlds in this way without being self-conscious about ourselves as valuers and our relation to what we value, it is doubtful if what we get here is even a sound phenomenological description. While there surely is a kind of transcendent perspective sub specie aeternitatis from which values simply disappear

12 ‘Value Based on Preferences: On Two Interpretations of Preference Utilitarianism’, Economics and Philosophy 12 (1996), p. 19. This paper is co-authored with Jan Österberg and they each take their own different positions in it.

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out of sight, and which is such that we probably cannot demand of a theory that it should be able to show how values are to make sense from within it, there is also the kind of weak transcendence that takes place within the internal perspective. This is where one thinks seriously about one’s life and one’s pursuits, what really is of value and what is not. This is the kind of self-conscious stance from which matters of value are truly important to us, but also precisely the perspective to which subjectivism seems to pose a threat. It is a perspective that is reflexive enough to leave room for us being self-conscious about our desires and philosophical enough for us to be able to think the undermining thought that if subjectivism is correct, the reason why certain things appear to us as having value is just because we happen to prefer them. Rabinowicz claims that ‘the value grounded in this way is not world-bound and contingent. It exhibits all the necessity that is characteristic of intrinsic value.’13 But what kind of necessity is this, when the value in question only exists in the subject’s eyes (and as long as he does not realize this)? And in what sense are we justified in speaking of this value as ‘grounded’? Even if we accept that there is a distinction to be drawn roughly where Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen draws it, we would like some reason why it should be understood as a distinction between supervenience base and constitutive ground, rather than between, say, imaginary base and, say, appreciative ground, i.e. a distinction between the features which the subject sees as good-making in the object, and the (psychological) features that make the subject see something nice in the object. Assume that we encounter a person who truly felt that his evaluative opinions were threatened by the rejection of Moorean objectivism – does it not seem wildly implausible that he or she would be calmed by the assertion that value is projected even across such worlds where he or she does not value the object in question? It would be like telling such a person that if she thinks that the thing would be valuable in other possible worlds, then she thinks that the thing is valuable in other possible worlds – or that as long as one is not bothered by the subjective component in values, one is not bothered by it. Accordingly, we get a strange relation between the way projectivism explicates the constitution of values and how values are experienced by the persons facing them. Values are normative entities, which means that they make certain demands on us and part of these demands is that we are supposed to have certain attitudes towards them.14 On the projectivist story we thus get a form of evaluative bootstrapping: we have an attitude towards an object that makes this object have a property

13 ‘Value Based on Preferences’, p. 22n12. 14 Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen are explicit about their adherence to this view, ibid., pp. 45-7.

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which in turn makes the attitude appropriate. Think of the moment where one comes to appreciate something as valuable. It seems quite reasonable that this involves forming a preference for the thing in question. But what comes first? Intuitively one would say that the value is prior to the preference. Yet, according to the projectivist, the value is not ‘there’ until after the preference has been formed, since it is only then that the constitutive ground of the value is established and the thing in question set ablaze with normativity. This problem becomes especially visible in cases where one is hesitant about whether a thing has value or not; one is looking for a decisive feature and the decisive feature is in reality whether one decides to value the thing or not. Is it possible to avoid this charge of bootstrapping? Rabinowicz acknowledges that there is a problem with hitherto unrecognized values, but argues that this can be solved by recourse to what we would prefer under some suitable set of circumstances.15 In that case, something can have value without someone actually valuing it. But this will surely not do since it internalizes the question of whether something has value or not. I might naturally take seriously preferences that I would have if better informed, but then it is because I presume that were I thus informed I would have come to realized certain things about what objects are valuable and why – otherwise the preferences I would have under some such ideal set of conditions are simply different preferences than the ones I have now. The question of what has value is not a question of what I would as a simple matter of fact happen to want were I different in certain respects, at least not if we want a picture that makes sense of the external ‘feel’ of values. But there is more. If the projection is not to be understood literally, it remains to be shown how the value that we ‘project’ achieves some kind of intersubjective validity. If that cannot be done, we will hardly make sense, in any interesting way, of the external ‘feel’ of values. We will at best provide an account of how certain blind spots are inherent to the internal perspective of a valuer. Now, clearly, if I ‘project’ values onto the world they are in some sense ‘there’ for me, but if I am not literally adding something to the world, then in what sense can such values be said to be ‘there’ for others as well? This is an issue that projectivists all too often fail to address. Perhaps many of them would be satisfied by saying that all values are simply values for someone, but I fail to see how this could amount to more than saying that all valuings are valuings of someone. It would not give any kind of ontological respectability to values and is thus quite inadequate if we want to give an account of the external ‘feel’ of values.

15 ‘Value Based on Preferences’, p. 21.

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3.3 Normativity, Sociality, and Reflexivity

Quasi-Moorean projectivism actually suffers from a difficulty similar to the one already pointed out as a serious problem for Korsgaard’s approach to values. However sympathetic one might be to the idea that human beings have value and that we are in some way erring if we do not recognize this value in others as well as in ourselves, there must be some argument as to why we should recognize this value in others. Korsgaard is, as has already been pointed out, acutely aware of this fact and she does have a strategy to deal with it. The key element of this strategy is an attack on the idea of agent-relative reasons. Of course, we often think that something can be ‘a reason for me, but not a reason for you.’ The problem is just that such ideas might make my reasons too much into my reasons, i.e. lead to a privatization of reasons. In arguing against this approach, Korsgaard draws a parallel between the nature of linguistic meaning and the nature of reasons. She refers to Wittgenstein’s private language argument and points to how, on her interpretation of it, the reason why a private language does not make sense is that the meaning of words is essentially normative; this means that there must be some possibility of error, which in turn rules out individual control over the meaning of words. This establishes the public nature of the space of linguistic meaning and it is important to note that our connection to this space is not contingent in the sense that we can opt in and out of it (we might of course become incapable of sharing in it, but that is a different matter); as Korsgaard puts it: ‘Philosophers have been concerned for a long time about how we understand the meaning of words, but we have not paid enough attention to the fact that it is so hard not to. It is nearly impossible to hear the words of a language you know as mere noise.’16 We must, Korsgaard argues, understand the normativity of reasons analogously; to take something as a reason cannot be something that is simply under my control, because if it were I could never be wrong in taking something as a reason, and thus it would not make sense to see reasons as normative in any interesting sense of the word. She gives a few examples to illustrate what she means. Take, for instance, a situation where you are walking and someone calls on you to stop. Is it then really possible to not take this as giving you a reason to stop? To not do so, Korsgaard suggests, would be to simply treat it as a piece of noise. For if you understand what this call means, you also understand that you have a reason to stop. Of course, you might be in a hurry and on some important business, so this reason might be overridden; but that does not remove the fact that you have a reason to stop. Another example is that of a

16 Sources of Normativity, p. 139.

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torturer and his victim. The latter asks the former ‘How would you like it if I did that to you?’ Now, presumably you would not be a torturer if such a thing really made you stop, but the important point is this: ‘We do not seem to need a reason to take the reasons of others into account. We seem to need a reason not to.’17 As words force their meaning upon us, reasons force themselves upon us. In the case of reasons, this is never the end of the matter since reasons might always be met by reasons; but the space in which this occurs is still a public one. The problem with this argument is that words and reasons, while sharing many features are not completely analogous. The practices involved in using words and in giving reasons are different in many ways. In using words to describe things, there is a single dimension in which our uses might be apt or not. However, in giving reasons there are two dimensions in which they might be apt and this has to do with the fact that reasons are inherently situated in practices of giving and taking. They are argumentative even in the case of a single person. Practical reasoning often takes the form of an internal dialogue, arguing back and forward as if one suffered from a mild form of split personality; but there is certainly nothing pathological about it. That the space of reasons18 in which deliberation takes place is a space of giving and taking things as reasons means that even in the case of one person there is a step between suggesting something as a reason and actually taking it as a reason. There is a reflective gap between the two, a gap which Korsgaard makes quite a big deal about in other places, and rightly so, but which she now seems to want to simply slide by. If I understand the other I cannot but understand her as giving a reason, but the step from there to embracing it as a reason for action is one that is not bridged by the mere inability to counter it with some other reason; this inability only becomes obligating if I have already entered into a relation with her as two persons who are reasoning together. This mode of relating to others might certainly be understood as the default mode of relating to them, but it is also one that I can opt out of with respect to certain people. Opting out does not mean that I must simply hear them as uttering mere noise. I can see perfectly well what they are doing, they are attempting to offer me reasons, it is just that we do not stand in the kind of relation to each other from which the game of giving and taking reasons is a natural extension; and so their reasons fall flat to the ground. 17 Ibid., pp. 140-1. 18 The notion of a ‘space of reasons’ is borrowed from Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). In more recent years, it is a notion that has been employed by John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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This weakness in Korsgaard’s account is accentuated by her insistence on the importance of what she calls practical identity for our taking things as reasons. What she refers to by this notion is ‘a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.’19 Of course, this is hardly ever anything that lies in the foreground of deliberation, rather the idea here is that it provides a necessary background to deliberation. This practical identity is not something that exists independently of reasons or antecedently to reasons. Rather, it and the things we take as reasons exist in a dialectical relationship: one’s practical identity structures one’s deliberations (which are oriented around reasons), but is also, at least in the long run, molded and reshaped by how one’s deliberations turn out. It seems reasonable to think that the more determinate one’s practical identity, the more rigid will one’s deliberative field of vision be, but no human being has such a determinate sense of who she is that she is closed off from unexpected results of her deliberations, results that might make her rethink who she is and reevaluate herself, her life, and her undertakings. Above all, it seems reasonable to think that one’s deliberative horizon stretches beyond those structurings that have to do with one’s practical identity in the sense that my deliberative field will overlap with the deliberative fields of others and, thus, there will be places where reasons that are grounded in my practical identity turn out to be able to interlock with reasons that are rooted in the practical identity of others and by the way of such deliberative bridges I might come to see things from another light, incorporate new features as ones that I take as reasons and, in the end, also be transformed as who I am. Although this kind of effect can at times be dramatic, for instance in conversions from one frame of mind to another, it is also something that on a smaller scale occurs on a day-to-day basis (if not perhaps every single day). The problem for Korsgaard is that while one’s practical identity is best understood as situated in this kind of social network of reasons, this need not mean that every single reason that exists in this human network as a whole must be taken as a reason given any practical identity situated in the network. Of course, given a reasonable familiarity with the social setting in which one lives, one will certainly be able to see that certain people count certain things as constituting reasons in certain contexts, and that this makes sense from their perspectives, while at the same time one does not oneself take these things as reasons. One’s horizon of understanding the behavior of others as intelligible surely extends beyond one’s own deliberative horizon. Accordingly, there would be something seriously wrong with the torturer if he was utterly unable to recognize his victim as attempting to offer him a reason to

19 Ibid., p. 101.

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refrain, or with the person that is called on to stop if she did not recognize her caller as offering her a reason to stop. But from there to taking it as a reason is a considerable step – not necessarily considerable in the sense that it need take much time and effort; when someone for instance calls on us to stop we usually do so without much thought. Yet, our practice of taking someone calling on us to stop as providing a sufficient reason to stop surely depends on the fact that we know that when people do so it is usually a good idea to stop. What might look as something simply forcing itself upon us is still a matter of us having a deeply entrenched policy to take it as a reason. Were it the case that we were constantly called upon to stop without there being anything in it for us were we to do so, we would probably grow almost deaf to such calls, much in the way that the torturer grows deaf to the calls on him to stop. I use the word ‘almost’ quite intentionally here; for while I am not convinced by Korsgaard’s way of analyzing the sociality of reasons, she is on to something important. Even if we were to cease heeding people’s calls on us to stop, we would not just simply grow deaf to them; there would be a certain discomfort in not heeding them. Were we truly to grow deaf, as perhaps some torturers truly grow deaf to the calls from their victims, then that would not just be a matter of simply choosing not to regard something as a reason, it would be essentially connected to a coarsening of our sensitivities. One way of understanding this is through making clear that while one’s practical identity is indeed a description under which one values oneself, finds one’s life worth living, and one’s actions worth undertaking, this practical identity is not simply just situated in a social network of reasons, it is as such an essentially social phenomenon. The reason for this is that we become persons through a social process and even though a Kantian wants to emphasize individual freedom and reflective distance from one’s concrete identity, this freedom and reflective distance cannot be understood as preexisting the concrete self that one is. As George Herbert Mead puts it:

The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience. After a self has arisen, it in a certain sense provides for itself its social experiences, and so we can conceive of an absolutely solitary self. But it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience. When it has arisen we can think of a person in solitary confinement for the rest of his life, but who still has himself as a companion, and is able to think and to converse with himself as he had communicated with others.20

20 Mind, Self & Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 140.

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As Mead understands the adult individual, she is characterized by a dialectic between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, where the latter is a social product constituted by an organized set of attitudes of others, and the ‘I’ is the reflective response to this.21 Thus, what we have here are two sides to being self-conscious, on the one hand being an object, a ‘me’, on the other being constantly responding and, in a certain sense, transcending this object. The practical identity of which Korsgaard speaks should be read in the light of this understanding of the ‘me’, and the reflective distance the Kantian keeps reminding us of should be understood as the ubiquity of the transcendence of the ‘I’. Of course, this social dimension of the self is something that Kant himself is not known to dwell on; in fact, a sentimentalist like Hume is much more prone to draw our attention to it, for instance with his comments about how ‘[i]n general we may remark, that the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each others emotions, but also because the rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees’22 and how ‘[m]en always consider the sentiments of others in their judgments of themselves’.23 There is, however, nothing in such Humean remarks that the Kantian cannot accept. Rather, the difference lies in the Kantian’s insistence on the importance of the reflective distance between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’. Indeed, it does not seem far-fetched to suggest that the sense of normativity that an adult human has is rooted precisely in this capacity for ‘stepping back’. Some might, like Hegel, resent this Kantian insistence on a reflective gap and dream of a mode of existence where there is no ‘ought’ but just an ‘is’24 and it is certainly understandable why Hegel wishes for a closure here since there seem to be no guarantee that this reflective opening will lead anywhere at all; rather, we might just be left with a gaping wound in our selves, the essential unrest of one who is perpetually always something of a stranger even to herself. On the other hand, would there not be something inhuman about such a closed existence? Moreover, it should be remembered that what the Kantian insists on is the importance of the capacity for reflectively distancing oneself from who one is and what one is doing. The extent to which one should actually do it is, of course, something that also needs to be addressed, but it is something that will have to wait for a while. For now, the important thing is that this capacity is not some

21 Ibid., pp. 173-75. 22 A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge & P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 365. 23 Ibid., p. 303 24 See especially the second section of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate in G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).

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isolated phenomenon; it permeates the meaning of the entire deliberative field through the way that it opens up a horizon of questioning. The capacity for reflective distance allows us to question the way that we lead our lives and I take it that most people find at least a certain modicum of such reflection as important for leading a fully human life. However, the traditional Kantian story insists on more than just the importance of this capacity; it also insists on a certain way of understanding human freedom, one that lies far from the emphasis on the social nature of the space of reasons that I have tended towards in this section and which I would like to develop further. Can there really be any room within a Kantian theory for this strong emphasis on the social? To ascertain the answer to this question, we must look further into the nature of human freedom.

3.4 Kant and the Problem of Freedom

I have already argued that the main problem with Moorean objectivism is that it relies on a dualism between facts and values that mystifies the existence of values, that places them in a relation to the empirical world that leaves them hanging on a rather thin thread: a mere flick of the wrist, Occam’s razor in hand, and we are rid of them. It is not difficult to see that the freedom of the will stands in much the same peril. And if Moore puts values at peril much through his dualism, it might worriedly be noted that Kant’s philosophy is among the most dualistic of all philosophies. As any reader of Kant will soon notice there is a plethora of dualisms throughout his writings: the phenomenal and the noumenal, freedom and nature, the categorical and the hypothetical, the rational and the sensuous, duty and inclination, and so on. Of all these distinctions it is of course the one between noumenon and phenomenon that occupies the central place since it is in terms of this one that other distinctions tend to be interpreted (and here ‘interpreted’ should not be understood as ‘reduced to’ but rather that it is through having a connection traced to this distinction that other distinctions tend to be fitted into the Kantian system). Unfortunately, it is also this distinction that is the most difficult to grasp, something which is in part surely due to the fact that, in contrast to most of the other distinctions, we have absolutely no pre-philosophical understanding of it. The best way to approach the interpretation of the distinction is probably, at least in the present context, to look at what problem it is to solve, or resolve, in ethics, namely the tension between freedom and necessity. This is a tension that Kant dealt with already in the first Critique, more specifically in his discussion of the Third Antinomy which consists in a thesis that affirms the necessity of assuming the existence of a causality of freedom and an antithesis according to

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which everything that takes place in the world does so in accordance with the laws of nature. Kant’s resolution, as is well-known, is to argue that in the realm of appearances the laws of nature reign supreme, while we must still assume a causality of freedom as a cause of the natural order. This need however not mean that human action proves an exception to natural causality and in his attempts to explicate the workings of this causality of freedom in human beings, Kant pursues two lines of reasoning, both of which involve the idea of a reciprocal relation between freedom and morality. These two lines of reasoning do however run in opposite directions. In the Groundwork, Kant uses this idea to ground the moral law: since the moral law is the law of a free will, we must act in accordance with the moral law in order to be free. The problem with this argument, as has been pointed out forcefully by Sidgwick,25 is that it renders the notion of responsibility, which is of pivotal importance in ethics and clearly connected with freedom, useless since the bare fact that we act contrary to the law is, then, sufficient proof that we are not acting freely and thus cannot be held accountable for our actions. In fact, we can only be held accountable in those cases where there is little point in holding us accountable, namely when we act rightly. The second line of reasoning is presented in the second Critique; there it is our acting on the moral law rather than the freedom of the will that is taken for granted, and Kant argues for the actuality of the freedom of the will by appealing to our acting on the moral law. The idea here is not that we are only free when we act out of morality, but rather that since those instances when we do act out of morality proves the actuality of a causality of freedom, we must interpret those cases where we do not act out of morality as ones where we let ourselves be carried to action by our desires, i.e. even if there is a sense in which we do not act freely in these cases, the actions in question are still ones that we can be held accountable for since in a deeper sense we have in this case chosen not to let the causality of freedom have an effect on happenings in the world. The problem with this line of argument is the opposite one than what was the case with the argument in the Groundwork. There the problem was that too few of our actions are such that we can be held accountable for them, here the problem is that we can be held accountable for too many of them. It has been suggested by quite a few Kantians that one of the fundamental problems that lies in coming to appreciate Kantianism correctly lies in that we tend to read Kant as presenting us with a two-world ontology, whereas we should read him as presenting us with two aspects under which the one world

25 The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., Appendix: ‘The Kantian Conception of Free Will’ (originally in Mind 13 (1888)).

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can be considered.26 Not that Kant can be held blameless for this ‘misinterpretation’ since he often writes as if it is a matter of two worlds, that sometimes even interact causally with each other, and some key passages can be interpreted in both ways. Take the following example:

[A rational being has] two points of view from which he can regard himself and from which he can know laws governing the employment of his powers and consequently governing all his actions. He can consider himself first – so far as he belongs to the sensible world – to be under laws of nature (heteronomy); and secondly – so far as he belongs to the intelligible world – to be under laws which, being independent of nature, are not empirical but have their ground in reason alone. (G 452)

Is it the fact that we really do belong to two worlds that makes it possible for us to take these two different standpoints, or is it the fact that we can take these two different standpoints that makes us able to think of the world in two different ways and thus, in a sense, constitute them as distinct realms? As it stands, I would say that this passage tends towards the first position, but it is possible that a case could be made for the other one. Luckily, this is a question that we need not enter further into here. Since both interpretations involve the two standpoints, there is good reason to look further at what is involved in the difference between them. It would seem that one is the standpoint of the observer, a scientific, or perhaps a third-personal, point of view. The other is the standpoint of the agent, a practical, or perhaps a first-personal, point of view from which we deliberate about what we ought to do. Among contemporary Kantian ethicists it is probably Christine Korsgaard who has most unequivocally emphasized the crucial nature of this distinction between standpoints. She fastens on Kant’s remark that we must act under the idea of freedom (G 448) and understands it in terms of a difference between a first-personal and a third-personal perspective.27 While we might often think about ourselves in terms of what causes us to behave in certain ways rather than others, all such thinking is completely beside the point when we are faced with making a decision: no matter how skilled our predictions are it is not they that

26 The leading exponent of this view is Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) and Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), but see also Lewis White Beck, ‘Five Concepts of Freedom in Kant’ in Jan Srzednicki (ed.), Stephan Körner – Philosophical Analysis and Reconstruction: Contributions to Philosophy (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), and Christine Korsgaard, ‘Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations’ in Creating the Kingdom of Ends. 27 Sources of Normativity, pp. 12-4.

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move us to action. While we might theoretically recognize the philosophical problem about the reconciliation of freedom and necessity, each and every philosopher, even the sternest of determinists, must still deliberate and decide from a first-personal relation to the action under consideration, thus deliberating under the idea of freedom. Nevertheless, while Korsgaard is surely capturing something essential about what it means to be a person and about the phenomenology of practical reasoning, there is a significant problem here and it is, in fact, exactly parallel to the problem that confronted her theory of value. Even those who are sympathetic to the project of establishing some form of reality for the freedom of the will would likely be prone to experience a certain unease when contemplating Korsgaard’s Kantian solution; the reason is that it seems to make freedom into something like an optical illusion brought about by a deliberative blind spot. Korsgaard’s response is that this kind of response presupposes that ‘real’ is defined as ‘what can be identified by scientists looking at things third-personally and from the outside.’28 Again, the problem here is one of intersubjective validity, and temporally probably even intrasubjective validity. The first is the most obvious: while we might have little choice but to act under the idea of freedom, we seem to be under no such compulsion to regard others under this idea and they do not seem to be under any compulsion to view the very same act that we must regard under the idea of freedom as anything but a product of natural causes. Indeed, given that the idea of freedom is tied to a first-personal mode of thinking, they seem to have little choice but to see our actions as completely determined. Additionally, once we ourselves have chosen and acted, our situation would seem to be exactly like that of the others. Given this, can we really view this freedom, the idea of which we have to deliberate under, as anything but an illusion? The problem in tying the ‘reality’ of freedom to the first-personal is that it might even make it impossible to regard others under the idea of freedom since we clearly cannot relate to others in a first-personal way and the third-personal perspective would seem to be one from which we would see others as simply causal products of their background, with as much freedom of choice as a weathervane. Korsgaard’s response to this is that although we obviously cannot take a first-personal relation to others, there is still something else than the third-personal mode of relating to them, namely the second-personal: to relate to the other as a ‘you’ is to address her in a way that treats her as a subject, not just an object.29 In many ways this kind of account comes close to Martin Buber’s

28 Ibid., p. 96. 29 ‘Creating the Kingdom of Ends’, p. 205.

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distinction between two fundamental modes of relating to that which is other to oneself, namely the I – It relation and the I – Thou relation, where the former involves relating to the other as a ‘something’ and the latter relating to the other as a ‘someone’.30 Still, even if there is something like a second-personal mode of relating to others, there does still seem to be room to claim that we are faced with an important asymmetry. While the first-personal relation to our actions is something which we not only can take but which we in fact cannot, at least not at certain points of time such as when we are about to decide what to do, avoid taking, the second-personal relation to others seems to be something that we can adopt, but not anything that we cannot avoid adopting. Of course, the mere fact that we can avoid to think in a certain way need not normally imply that there is something illegitimate or illusory about it, but since in this case the reality of freedom is asserted on the basis that we cannot think otherwise and since we can think otherwise when it comes to others this not only gives us the problem of how to show those who do not treat others as persons that they should do so, it will actually undermine the behavior of those who do treat others as persons.

3.5 The Teleological Conception of Freedom

In an attempt to distinguish between different conceptions of freedom in Kant’s writings, Lewis White Beck has pointed to the existence of another conception of freedom that Kant never fully explicates but which he nevertheless operates with in the third Critique, more specifically in the resolution of the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment. As pointed out by Beck, this antinomy is analogous to the Third Antinomy in the first Critique, but the reconciliation it requires is between mechanical and teleological law, i.e. between mechanical causes and final causes, and the shape that this reconciliation takes is not ontological, but methodological.31 Wherein does the difference between mechanical and final causes lie then? To cite a mechanical cause is to say that something happens because of something else whereas to cite a final cause is to say that something happens for the sake of something else. Today, people do perhaps mostly associate telic causality with Aristotle and think of it as an entirely outmoded model of explanation and, in a certain sense, Kant would agree: telic causality has no place within the natural sciences. The problem is just that we still need to understand many natural phenomena in terms of telic causality; not just in the

30 See I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), Chapter 1. 31 ‘Five Concepts of Freedom’, p. 44.

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sense that we understand events in this way, but also that our very way of conceptualizing nature involves a host of functional concepts. Be this as it may, if we move from our attempts at comprehending nature to human action, we must clearly acknowledge that we often explain our behavior in terms of final causes. Note that the difference between mechanical and telic accounts of behavior is not a difference between the conscious and the unconscious. It is not at all uncommon that we come to see in retrospect that the reason why we did something was not what we thought at the time of acting. Neither is this a phenomenon that is restricted merely to trivial matters; it might very well have to do with central concerns in our lives such as love, where we might sometimes act for the sake of some romantic interest without ourselves always realizing that this is the case. When we do come to realize such hidden motivations this revelation need not at all be couched in mechanical terms. Of course, they might be, but often enough they take a telic shape: we discover what we really were aiming at (i.e. our behavior was still purposive, just not in the way we ourselves thought). In fact, this actually falls quite well in line with Kant’s thinking about action since he is very open to the fact that the principles underlying our behavior might be opaque to us (G 398-9; MM 446). Now, when we address other people and ask them for reasons why they did, or are about to do, some action, we do not expect them to cite any mechanical cause, we do not expect to hear what pushed, or even more peculiar: is about to push, them into action, but rather to be told what the reasons for the sake of which they acted were. Moreover, while we invariably comprehend many natural occurrences in terms of telic causality, these are still final causes that are strictly defined by the function that we ascribe to the objects involved in the occurrences in question. Human beings differ in that the way in which they act according to telic causality is not linked to them being defined by a certain function, at least not in any apparent way. Human beings invent their own final causes and what these causes will be is something that varies from person to person and from situation to situation. If we understand freedom not as freedom from causality (which is an idea that is somewhat difficult to understand and, to the small extent that one can understand it, does not seem to give us a palatable form of freedom anyway), but rather as freedom from mechanical causation, then if we can secure a place for telic causality it would seem that we could have a teleological conception of freedom. The question of freedom under discussion here is, of course, about the freedom of the will and, before we proceed further, it might therefore be appropriate to say a few words about the will. It is a subject that I will look more into in the following chapter, but it should be noted already now that for Kant, to be in possession of a will is essentially about being able to act on conceptions

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of laws. This capacity has two elements, the first is that one acts on maxims, the second that one is able to reflectively endorse these maxims. Kant’s position is that while we do not always reflectively endorse our maxims, we still always act on maxims. This means that there is an ever-present principled dimension in our actions. The typical structure of a maxim is telic: ‘do x in order to a’. Although we rarely, even if we are Kantians, explicitly interpret the behavior of others in terms of maxims, we can still be understood as doing so when we regard their behavior as purposive, i.e. as goal-driven, and evaluate the reasonableness of their actions in terms of the extent to which these actions achieve the goals for the sake of which they act. It should be noted that maxims, however oriented they might be towards particular situations, are always framed in general terms and this is why there is a principled dimension in acting on maxims: the particular maxim always transcends the particular situation, it always ‘spills over’ in terms of implications for other similar situation. Additionally, to interpret an action as grounded in a certain maxim rather than some other is something that we must always approach through a cluster of counterfactuals. This epistemic condition fixes the nature of maxims so that any given maxim always rests on a network of counterfactual assumptions about behavior in other situations. Accordingly, to act on a maxim is always to take up a preliminary position in a space of reasons. It is important to note the ‘preliminary’ here, since this is something that occurs even when we do not explicitly reflect over choices. We do of course have the ability to do so, and then we might move into actively shaping the position we take in this space of reasons, but that is another matter; for now the important point is that we cannot but take up some such position. This does not mean that we cannot view actions in any other way. We might for instance cite backgrounding factors having to do with previous experiences of the subject, perhaps his conditions of upbringing, and maybe even some physiological factors. It should however be noted that if the above is read in the light of the move Kant makes in the resolution of the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment, the characterization of maxims given here is, at any rate, not meant to be strictly ontological, but rather as explicating what lies implicit in, as Howard Caygill puts it in his analysis of Kant’s third Critique, a certain ‘horizon of interpretation’.32 What Beck is trying to outline is a Kantian understanding, and underpinning, of our everyday practices of interpreting the behavior of others. He distinguishes between two such approaches and contends that each presupposes a specific methodological postulate:

32 Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 376-7.

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(a) Postulate for the scientific explanation of human actions: In natural sciences always seek natural causes, and do not admit non-natural causes in the explanation of natural phenomena (including human actions). (b) Postulate for ethical and practical decisions: Act as if the maxim of your will were a sufficient determining ground for the action undertaken. (Corollary: Postulate for the normative evaluation of another’s action: Judge as if the maxim of the will were a sufficient determining ground for the action in question.)33

Involved in the second approach is a teleological conception of freedom that Beck understands as what he calls a ‘concept of postulated freedom’. The reason why he understands it as a concept of freedom is that since it takes the maxim seriously as causally effective, this postulate involves seeing the will as causally effective. It might of course be objected that this postulated freedom is simply something illusory, a mere fiction, as is evident from the use of ‘as if’ in Beck’s formulations. Beck himself points out that such a reading presupposes mechanical determinism as a metaphysical truth in comparison with which the postulated freedom of (b) can hardly be seen as anything but a mere fiction. But the point here is that mechanical determinism is not understood as a metaphysical truth; rather than being a constitutive principle of the world, it is a methodological principle that is constitutive of a certain practice, science, that we employ in coming to grips with the world. As such methodological principles they do not stand in contradiction to each other since they are not making opposite statements about the world; they are just two ways in which we can come to grips with the world, the one being superior in some contexts, the other superior in others. In relation to the previous discussion of naturalism, it might be noted that Peter Strawson has distinguished between two kinds of naturalism, a ‘reductive’ (or ‘strict’ or perhaps ‘hard’) variant which recognizes as respectable no perspective expect that which is represented by the natural sciences, especially physics, and a ‘liberal’ (or ‘catholic’ or perhaps ‘soft’) variant, which recognizes the scientific take on the world but which also holds that there is another take on the world that is compatible with, but irreducible to, the scientific one.34 Beck draws a comparison between his account and the complementarity of the wave theory of the electron and the particle theory; taken abstractly they might be seen as contradicting each other, but they never contradict each other in any concrete observational situation since in any given one, the electron is

33 Ibid., p. 45. 34 Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (London: Methuen, 1985). Strawson points out that he uses ‘catholic’ and ‘liberal’ in ‘their comprehensive, not in their specifically religious or political, senses’ (p. 1). For a similar distinction, see John McDowell, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’ in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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either best understood as acting like a particle or like a wave.35 The question is however whether this parallel is especially apt. The choice between the wave theory and the particle theory in a specific observational situation is, as far as I can see, never a live question. However, in the case of actions, the relation between our two possible horizons of interpretation seems considerably more complex. To begin with, there does in many cases appear to be a choice between them and in some we might even feel genuinely disconcerted about which one we should adopt. It should be noted here that in this circumstance there is good reason to use the word ‘disconcerted’ rather than something like ‘puzzled’. The reason is that this choice of approach, or standpoint, is also something that in turn can be interpreted in terms of either standpoint. Adopting the scientific horizon of interpretation means that we will not look at the action in a normative light; but the mere possibility to interpret this choice of standpoint from within the horizon of postulated freedom means that there is an inescapable normative import in this very choice. There is truth in the Sartrean idea that determinism is an attitude of excuse: if we adopt the scientific horizon of interpretation, matters of blame and guilt become irrelevant, which means that we have in effect taken a stand on the question of responsibility. Thus, if we allow that the horizon of postulated freedom is a legitimate one, it will dominate the choice of which standpoint we should adopt in any given concrete situation with respect to the action in question. This clearly has no equivalent in the case of the choice between the wave theory and the particle theory. Yet, this is not the only difference. With respect to human action, the two standpoints are clearly intimately tangled up with each other. This can most clearly be seen when we think about the scientific attitude. While it is certainly true that we might adopt it, it is also modeled on physics (which it probably must be, since it is surely from the standpoint of physics that we tend to make statements about what is ‘really real’ and what is not). There are however many things that are parts of the furniture of the world of everyday life and which have no place in the story that physics has to tell about the world. Actions are an obvious example of this; while a scientific approach might certainly employ ‘action’ as an analytical category, it is still quite apparent that were it not for the fact that we had access to the other horizon of interpretation we would not be able to pick out any actions at all from the sub-atomic swirl that physics seems set to end up with as the ultimate ‘substance’ of the world.36 Accordingly, even if

35 Ibid., p. 47. 36 It might be noted that the reason why the category of (mechanical) causality is understood by Kant, in the first Critique, to be a necessary one, is that the very identification of particular events presupposes the web of causality as a grid within which these events can be placed and

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we might at times be able to adopt a strictly scientific perspective on certain human actions, the very possibility of this stance is parasitical on the order of meaning that is connected with the other horizon of interpretation. One thing that lies in the Kantian insistence on the importance of the category of maxims (even if we rarely use the word ‘maxim’) is thus an idea that has been explicated by Alasdair MacIntyre as the fact that the category of ‘intelligible actions’ is prior to the category of ‘actions’.37 At first glance, this idea might perhaps even seem absurd since the former is clearly a more complex notion than the latter, but this is just a mistake. Concept-formation should not be understood as always moving from the atomic to the complex. Most concepts are formed within a network of other concepts, where this network opens us certain proto-conceptual spaces as meaningful entities. Once these spaces are conceptually appropriated, new spaces might open up and whether these lie at a more simple or a more complex level is an open question. What we have here are two notions of ‘action’, a narrow according to which only those humanly produced events that can be understood as grounded in maxims are actions, and a broader according to which all humanly produced events can be understood as actions. The latter is the notion that is the primary one from the scientific standpoint (although the first one might also in some form be utilized there), but since it is conceptually posterior to the first one, the scientific horizon of interpretation with respect to human actions presupposes the horizon of postulated freedom.38

3.6 Regarding Others under the Idea of Freedom

The participant attitude involved in the second horizon of interpretation is not just something that interprets a world already given. Rather, many of our interactions presuppose it and, in turn, such interactions are constitutive of the social world in which we make our choices and perform our actions. This is probably most clearly seen in the importance of what Peter Strawson has called ‘reactive attitudes’, i.e. feelings of resentment, blame, and so forth.39 Strawson thus distinguished (space and time, as forms of intuition do of course also create a grid, but in order to carve up the content of this grid in a meaningful way something more is required and the category of causality provides us with that). Analogously, the category of telic causality is necessary in order for us to pick out actions as meaningful objects of explanation. 37 After Virtue, pp. 206-10. 38 Although he does not go into this in ‘Five Concepts’, Beck is not oblivious to it; he discusses it in The Actor and the Spectator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), Chapter 4. 39 ‘Freedom and Resentment’ in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974).

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distinguishes between three kinds of reactive attitudes. The first are the personal ones, which have to do with our reactions to the attitudes and behavior, whether benevolent, malevolent, or indifferent, of others towards us. Resentment is an example of such an attitude. The second category consists of the vicarious attitudes, which are generalized analogues of the personal attitudes; they are reactions to the behavior of others towards further others. The third are self-reactive attitudes, which are associated with demands on oneself for others: feeling bound or obliged, guilty or remorseful, and so on. These attitudes form an essential part of many interactions between humans; indeed, it is difficult to see how anyone could become an adult human being without being immersed in the network of interactions that is characterized by their existence. For instance, Mead’s idea about the internalization of the generalized other is clearly connected to this process; through this internalization the attitudes of one’s community become part of the individual and as Mead puts it ‘only through the taking by individuals of the attitude or attitudes of the generalized other toward themselves is the existence of a universe of discourse, as that system of common or social meanings which thinking presupposes as its context, rendered possible.’40 The attitudes to which Mead refers include more than the reactive ones, but the reactive ones form an essential part of them. Now, it is quite clear that the reactive attitudes are very much involved in those practices that have to do with matters of responsibility; this, and the fact that they are attitudes that are appropriate within a participant attitude to social life, points towards an understanding of what it means to regard another under the idea of freedom. It might perhaps be objected that we often harbor these sentiments towards other people without having taken the slightest consideration as to whether they are free and responsible persons or not and that it would therefore seem that these attitudes are independent of such matters. This position thus rests on a presumption that judgments and sentiments can be neatly separated, a view that is hardly plausible. If I behave in certain ways towards another person, for instance by blaming her for certain actions, then I can reasonably be said to implicitly judge her as a responsible person given that I am generally competent within the sphere of the relevant family of reactive attitudes (which means that I do not, for instance, systematically have reactive attitudes towards flowers or cows, etc.). When we first raised the problem affecting Korsgaard’s position on freedom, namely that it did not provide us with any reason why we should regard others, or indeed ourselves at other points of time, under the idea of freedom, then the way we raised the question made it sound as if our options were more open than

40 Ibid., p. 156.

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they really are. If freedom is understood in terms of the postulated freedom of the non-scientific horizon of interpretation, then it is clear that in general we cannot but view others under this idea of freedom; they would not even make sense to us as acting human beings otherwise. If, to borrow an example from Strawson,41 someone treads on my hand then my resentment will harbor a recognition of the freedom and responsibility of the other. Of course, on closer inspection I might abandon this attitude of resentment, for instance if I find out that this someone was actually sleep-walking; but the point here is just that the default position is to regard the other as free, in the sense that I regard her as a being who acts on maxims, and that this is the only stance that one can live as a default horizon of interpretation with respect to human beings. That it is a default stance means that rather than it being the case that we need a reason to adopt it, we need reason to abandon it. And there might certainly be such reasons. In fact, even though an immersion into this repertoire of reactive attitudes are part of what constitutes one as a civilized being, it is still the case that in many cases, the only civilized option in interpreting certain instances of behavior is to adopt what Strawson calls ‘the objective attitude’ towards others.42 This is especially the case in some quite serious situations of relating to the behavior of others. For instance, on closer examination, we might find that some criminals have a background that makes it impossible to take seriously telic accounts of their actions. What we in effect do in such cases is that we shift from trying to comprehend their actions in a telic way to giving mechanical account of them. Certainly, to do so is to adopt, as Sartre would have it, an attitude of excuse since it involves an exemption of what must be the normal mode of interpretation; but in certain cases this does still strike us as the only civilized thing to do. It should be noted that there might exist cases where the persons in question themselves may want to explain their actions in terms of their doing something for the sake of something rather than because of something, but that they do this is hardly surprising given the difficulty that lies in removing oneself from a first-personal mode of relating to one’s own actions. In contrast, theirs are cases where we find it difficult to adopt a second-personal mode towards them. As we saw in our discussion of Kant’s metaphysical conception of freedom, one problem with it was that it yielded a far too encompassing understanding of what we are responsible for and, thus, it is only welcome if we could conceptualize freedom in a way that does not lead to such an absurd inflation of responsibility. But while this is true, there remains to be said something about what it is that makes the objective attitude appropriate in

41 Ibid., p. 5. 42 Ibid., p. 12.

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certain cases; since both it and the participant attitude are understood as grounded in methodological principles rather than metaphysical facts, the resolution of this question can hardly have to do with some deep metaphysical difference between those whom we regard under the idea of freedom and those that we do not. Yet, there must be some difference if the choice to make this distinction is to be possible to be made in a responsible way at all. Since the approach outlined here suggests that the methodological principle of postulated freedom should be regarded as a constitutive principle for the social realm of interpersonal relations, i.e. without this methodological principle there would be no social realm, it seems reasonable to tie the resolution of this question about differentiation to the matter of sociality. The difference between the deranged, or otherwise unfree and non-responsible, and the normal lies in that the latter is socially integrated in a shared space of reasons. It is also here that we can find the most significant difference between the account of freedom outlined here and what might perhaps be understood as a more orthodox Kantian position, a difference which, even though this can certainly be called a Kantian theory, centered as it is on the notion of ‘maxims’ and with its incorporation of elements from the third Critique, actually tends in what might be understood as a communitarian direction. What I mean by this is that, according to the account outlined here, actual judgments about whether to consider someone under the idea of freedom or not cannot be settled simply by looking at some set of formal conditions of choice. Rather, even though there is a certain formal framework within which we must address these matters, the answer to whether a certain action is free or not must in the final analysis be sought in the actual reasons that are valid in the social space where the act is situated. Take, for instance, this case from a standard textbook in biomedical ethics:

An involuntarily committed mental patient wishes to leave the hospital, although his family is opposed to his release. The patient argues that his mental condition does not justify confinement. However, after one previous release, he plucked out his right eye, and after another release he severed his right hand. The patient functions competently in the state hospital, where he sells news materials to fellow patients and handles limited financial affairs. The source of his ‘problems’ is his religious beliefs. He regards himself as a true prophet of God and believes that ‘it is far better for one man to believe and accept an appropriate message from God to sacrifice an eye or a hand according to the sacred scriptures rather than for the present course of the world to cause even greater loss of human life.’ Acting on this belief, he engages in self-mutilation.43

43 Tom L. Beauchamp & James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 280.

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Should we regard these acts, and intentions, of self-mutilation under the idea of freedom? Or should we take the objective attitude, protect him from himself, and perhaps wonder how we should cure him from this propensity? On a strictly formalist theory we would list certain conditions (like whether his beliefs and desires form coherent systems, whether he has deliberated thoroughly, etc.), and it is certainly possible that on some such theories we would get the result that he should not be regarded under the idea of freedom, which I take it must surely be the correct answer. The problem is just that this is a kind of judgment that we would reach anyway, on material rather than formal grounds and cases like this are such that we will tend to construct our formalist theories to give the right answer in them. The account given here goes in a different direction: it gives a formal framework that makes sense of the way in which we can rely on our substantive intuitions about cases like this. It should be noted that this does not mean that we can rule out such a person from being regarded under the idea of freedom in all possible contexts. The extent to which we can rule him out depends on the shape of the space of reasons within which he is situated. We can take a different case, also from biomedical ethics, namely that of the attitude taken by Jehovah’s Witnesses towards blood transfusions. This is clearly an attitude that is quite unreasonable from the perspective of most of us. Does this mean that the civilized thing to do is not to regard them under the idea of freedom? This is considerably more doubtful than in the case of the self-mutilator and it does not have to do with the danger involved (in those cases where the attitudes of Witnesses on these matters become relevant the danger is naturally severe). Rather, the difference is that the Witnesses make up a social group, a community of thinking where they reason together and thus constitute a shared space of reasons. It is also the case that the space of reasons shared by Jehovah’s Witnesses in many ways interlocks with key components of the space of reasons in which all contemporary Westerners share, namely that which draws on the Christian heritage and which involves at least remnants of a world-view that valorizes sacrifices made out of faith. Of course, the self-mutilator also sacrifices himself out of faith, it is just that he does not, due to the private nature of his beliefs, share in our space of reasons sufficiently enough so that he can draw on this potential. Thus, contrary to the result yielded in his case, it does in fact seem quite reasonable to regard at least adult Jehovah’s Witnesses under the idea of freedom and thus take a respectful stance towards their wishes on matters having to do with blood transfusions. Likewise, if we leave the area of biomedical ethics for a while, the reason why we find it impossible to regard certain criminals, like psychopaths, under the idea of freedom is that their motivational and justificatory structures

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are largely asocial; we might perhaps reason with them, in the sense that we can communicate with each other, but what we cannot do is to reason together with them. Accordingly, on this reading, autonomy, in the sense of being governed by reason and thus acting freely, is not something that an individual human being can ever have simply by herself in some automatic fashion, but is rather always also rooted in the participation in a shared space of reasons. Of course, given this picture there is a rather difficult question of how much overlap there must be in order for reactive attitudes to be appropriate, in order for it to be meaningful to say that we can be co-reasoners or co-inhabitants of some specific space of reasons. There is unfortunately no reason to expect that there is some neat criterion that we can use to determine this matter, especially since it seems to be a matter of differences in degree rather than differences in kind. But, then again, we should perhaps not expect there to be some strict criterion since we do tend to relate to others in an impure manner, in a way that is a mixture of the telic and the mechanical. Of course, this is just what we would expect given that we accept that the everyday mode of relating to the world is thick in the sense that the normative and the descriptive are interwoven with each other. This fits well with the phenomenology of our reactive attitudes since while sticking strictly to the objective attitude might sometimes be the only civilized thing to do, we often take a more moderate approach, letting our reactive attitudes be tempered by what we see when looking at things with the objective attitude. If the extent to which we regard a piece of behavior under the idea of freedom is linked to our reactive attitudes, it would thus seem reasonable to say that we can allow gradations in freedom. This would be a clear advantage with the approach outlined here since orthodox Kantianism usually tends towards an either/or-approach to the question of whether an action is free or not, and this does not fit well with our everyday thinking and practices. Take, for instance, the way children gradually come to occupy the same space of reasons as us. Given the either/or-approach there must be some fundamental breaking-point where we start considering them as altogether free and before which they are to be regarded as altogether unfree. But not only would any such picking out of a concrete point of time be arbitrary, it would not fit with how we actually gradually come to regard children more and more under the idea of freedom, until we finally regard them as equals, i.e. as full co-inhabitants of our space of reasons.44 Now, given that freedom becomes intelligible within a social setting, it might certainly be wondered whether the same strategy will work for values, and it is to this question we now turn.

44 Cf. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, p. 19.

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3.7 Social Constructivism

If we look at the Western philosophical tradition there is certainly a cluster of problems and key arguments that run as important threads throughout its history, but there are also more subtle, and yet pervasive, tendencies. They are characterized not by the way that they are explicitly laid out in philosophical texts, but by how they nevertheless tend to shape the way we think about many philosophical issues; they are recurrent themes in the ways in which we illustrate, and thus make intelligible, abstract philosophical theories and the ways in which we formulate key examples for use as arguments. Since being fed a one-sided diet of examples will tend to lead to one-sided philosophical thinking, it might be of some use to say a few words about two such tendencies that have had much influence on the way we think about values. The first is the hegemony of vision. To a certain extent, this might simply be due to human beings trusting this particular sense more than our other senses, but the fact remains that epistemological thinking is largely framed in terms that have to do with vision, especially when it comes to conceptualizing the appearance/reality-distinction. Look at any work in this field and you will surely be fed a one-sided diet of examples and illustrations: shadows on cave walls, sticks in water, etc. If we turn to moral philosophy, there is the constant tendency to compare ethical properties with colors; whether the philosopher is a firm subjectivist like Hume, a hard-boiled objectivist like Moore, or something in between like McDowell, this tendency remains – in spite of the fact that when you think about the matter, it would seem that on a phenomenological level our apprehension of moral qualities is nothing like our apprehension of colors. And yet, this analogy keeps rearing its head. The second tendency of the philosophical tradition is a fixation with nature: there is a constant disregard of social phenomena. Just take the very notion of ‘naturalism’. When Moore wants to single out the special status of values, this could surely have been done in many ways, and yet he nevertheless chooses to do it through a distinction between natural and non-natural properties. And those who regard themselves as sober thinkers who will have none of mysterious normative or mental entities do of course call themselves ‘naturalists’ as if anything but nature is mysterious and suspect. Even a philosopher like Hegel, who certainly takes the social realm very seriously, cannot keep himself from conceptualizing the social world of Spirit as a ‘second nature’.45

45 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), § 4, and ‘The Phases of World History’ in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 208.

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Now, as we have seen, projectivism is riddled with difficulties and it might perhaps even be wondered if it is not simply a position that is the result of people having been misled by an unsuitable metaphor. The projectivist theme in moral philosophy is clearly tied up with both of the above tendencies. On the one hand, there is the idea of ‘gilding and staining’, which clearly invokes the analogy with color; on the other, there is the idea of a realm of solid facts, nature, pre-existing human thinking and on which the realm of values is super-imposed. In contrast to this, the social world is one that we do not directly perceive with our senses and one where this kind of dualistic separation of the factual and the normative seems quite out of place. Since projectivism fails and the non-Moorean non-Mackiean is left with the task of making sense of the external ‘feel’ of values, it would accordingly seem that one possibility that needs to be considered is to view values as a form of social facts, i.e. as entities which are constructed through the way we think and behave together as members of a shared social setting. Social facts are not robust in the sense that they can be identified from a physicist’s point of view, but neither are they as fickle as individual fancies since they are held in place collectively. Due to its overuse in some academic circles, the very mention of a notion like ‘social construction’ might perhaps seem initially unappealing to many,46 but excesses notwithstanding it remains exceedingly clear that we live in a world that is tremendously rich in social constructions, things that exist because we together think and behave in certain ways. For instance, as an employee of a university I would hardly claim that it, or the subject of philosophy for that matter, really does not exist. Nor would there be much point in claiming that the money in my pocket is not really worth anything or that there is really no such thing as my rent being due at the end of the month. Neither could I claim without a quite hollow ring that countries like Sweden or Brazil really do not exist or that Brazil did not really beat Sweden in the 1958 World Cup final. There is certainly a sense in which I could maintain all this, since all of these things are not part of the fabric of the world as characterized by the science of physics. Still, such a position would amount to a rather silly view about existence. We live in a world of social constructions. Even physics as a subject is one of them. Of course, this is not 46 Especially since it is a notion often used in a subversive way, to undermine our belief in the reality of whatever is singled out as an object of social construction. In his recent book The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) Ian Hacking uses ‘social constructionism’ to name this kind of subversive approach. Although the ‘social constructivism’ I am discussing here also entails that many of the things we take for granted are not inevitable facts-of-life, it closes in on its subject matter from the other direction: not to unmask something as being not as solid as it is often made out to be, but rather to show that certain things are not as vaporous as one might sometimes think they are.

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the place to go into the details of social ontology; the main point is just that social constructivism can make intelligible the way that values are independent of what the single individual might think or feel. It thus also allows the kind of deliberative space that is needed for the possibility that individuals can discover the value of certain things or realize that they were previously deluded. An obvious parallel is to language. That certain noises and marks have meaning is entirely a human affair, but it is also an essentially social affair. I cannot single-handedly make a word mean a certain thing. If I blatantly deviate from common usage, then I am wrong, and if I am wrong, there is room for me to discover how I really should go about. It might perhaps be objected that it is not at all obvious that the existence of values and reasons can be parallel to the existence of universities and soccer teams, and to a certain extent this is a correct observation. But as has been pointed out by John Searle, a significant part of the institutions that make up the social world are defined by the way in which certain positions are imbued with specific deontic powers.47 For instance, the Presidency of the United States is, at least partially, defined by the rights and obligations that the holder of this office has and these are, in turn, embedded in a rich fabric of rights and obligations that belong to other positions in the institutional structure that constitutes the government of the United States. The holders of positions in this structure can, by making certain moves, create reasons for action that are valid for other agents in this structure. Additionally, there are clearly many values imbued in the roles and offices within this structure, values that give a point to the actions performed by people in it and which we must grasp in order to understand the goings-on in these structures. However, the social realm is not just a matter of grand institutions like the government. On an everyday level, I do as a participant in our shared practices constantly create reasons for actions by making certain moves. For instance, to use one of Searle’s examples, if I order a beer, I have also created a reason to pay for that beer.48 Reasons that are created in this way are, of course, not reasons in any mysterious metaphysical sense; in the final analysis they exist because people collectively believe them to exist and, at least generally, behave accordingly – but is there any ground for not regarding them as real existences? When things happen in these social structures, then in many cases there is a quite intelligible sense in which they happen because they should happen. The realm of social institutions is a realm where telic accounts of what is going on are entirely apt. It is just that there is nothing mysterious about the normativity

47 The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 100-01. 48 Rationality in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 27-8.

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involved in these goings-on. Indeed, if we want to, we could always say that an agent does what he does because he thinks that he ought to do it, though this kind of explication is perhaps best kept for those cases where the agent in question is mistaken. For instance, if you ask me why I paid for the beer and I answer ‘because if you have ordered a beer, you ought to pay for it’, then it would only seem quaint to respond to me ‘ah, but the real cause was that you thought that you ought to pay for it’. After all, we are not talking here about physical causes for my muscular movements – since the objects of the social realm exist precisely because we think that they exist, it is simply unnecessary, and perhaps even misleading, to keep adding clauses about what we think when accounting for particular occurrences within this realm. Were I however wrong, e.g. in this particular pub the first beer is always on the house, then it does seem apt to explain my action by what I thought was the case, but as long as everything goes on in accordance with the normal functioning of our institutions and practices, it is not the thing to do. It might perhaps be objected that this is nothing more than methodological advice; but, as already pointed out, in the realm of human actions, there is no clear-cut boundary between the methodological and the ontological since what is takes shape through the way that we think about it. And as participants in this social realm the act of understanding people’s actions in terms of what these people think is the case is an act the purport of which is to put in question the normality of functioning in the case under consideration. Now, in the previous chapter I discussed the Brentano-style analysis of what it means for things to be good, namely to be worthy objects of pro-attitudes. Although this analysis might not do for all senses of ‘good’, it still seems to capture many such senses and we have seen that one problem with quasi-Moorean projectivism is that it fails to make sense of this ‘worthiness’. How about social constructivism? Brentano emphasizes the importance of how we intuit the correctness of certain instances of love and hate49 and this certainly provides some phenomenological gloss on the idea of worthiness, but if it must be backed up by a strong form of epistemic intuitionism, it becomes quite unpalatable. If we take a social constructivist perspective, things do however look different. We can still say that things like our attitudes and behavioral patterns are essentially involved in constituting values. But what the social dimension brings with it is an attitudinal and behavioral feedback loop that creates a sense of correctness that lies in the falling in line with them, much in the way that a sense of correctness arises in the individual when a group of people, to which she belongs, are clapping their hands or making music together

49 Ibid., Appendix 9.

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and, after an initial moment of disorder, fall into the same rhythm. Thus, just as in the case with quasi-Moorean projectivism, our attitudes are understood as being involved in both an act of constituting the value in question and in appreciating it. There is however an important difference. While social constructivism also holds that values are constituted by attitudes, the act of constitution is a collective one, i.e. it is the work of a plural subject,50 while the normativity that lies in the correctness part directs itself against the attitudes that we hold as individual subjects. Of course, this means that while values have a robustness vis-à-vis the individual valuer, this robustness is lost on the social level and this is probably an important reason why many people will feel dissatisfied with social constructivism. I will consider such worries in the next section; for now I would like to stress some of the things that I still find that it is quite unproblematic to say that social constructivism nevertheless delivers. There are at least two important components of the social world that are clearly part of the ethical domain, taken in a wide sense, and which social constructivism can surely account satisfactorily for: The first category is norms of etiquette. These might perhaps not be what moral philosophers take the keenest interest in since they are in many ways quite trivial and in many others quite arbitrary. But neither of these two points, however legitimate, can remove the fact the rules of etiquette are normative and that they guide our behavior in virtually all our interactions with other people. Thus, while they might not have the same qualitative importance as some moral rules, they surely have an immense importance if we look quantitatively at these matters. It also seems quite clear that the rules of etiquette are constituted not by any individualistic acts of projection, but through a communal holding of attitudes and shared behavioral patterns. The second category is what might be called social ideals and duties, i.e. the normative demands and standards of excellence that come with our social roles, whether it be as teachers, students, parents, friends, neighbors, athletes, citizens, or politicians. Again, these are aspects that most moral philosophers disregard, perhaps because they appear to us as somehow inauthentic duties and ideals, not really moral. A Kantian would certainly be the first to agree that there is a more strict use of ‘moral’ according to which these aspects are not moral; but they are nevertheless an important part of what makes up the mores of human societies. Not that there have not been any philosophers that have emphasized their importance; Hegel is, of course, the obvious example here with his insistence on ethical life [Sittlichkeit] as the highest form of morality, but there are also those,

50 This notion is taken from Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (London: Routledge, 1989), passim.

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like Bradley and Strawson, who appreciate this importance while still realizing that their is something more to morality.51 Whatever one might think about that, the fact still remains that a great amount of the ways in which we behave and the ways in which we judge the behavior of others is guided by our immersion into this world of social duties and standards of excellence. However, it might be objected, I previously criticized projectivism for trading on an ambiguity between phenomenological description and metaphysical affirmation, but is there not something similar at work here? Does not this kind of approach oscillate between the sociological and the metaphysical? To a certain extent, yes, there is tension between these two, but some such tension is nothing but what we should expect since the point here is trying to steer a path between mystifying normativity in a way that simply makes it unintelligible and naturalizing it in a way that makes values into something illusory, something that has no ontological respectability. The problem I have with projectivism is precisely that it makes the external ‘feel’ of values come out as something like an illusion due to a blind spot in the individual valuer. Now, I cannot say that social constructivism rules out the stance that values are simply illusions, but what it does is to raise the stakes for that kind of naturalist: if one is to say that being socially constructed means being illusory, there is just so much more that one must claim to be illusory. In contrast to projectivism, social constructivism provides us with a sense in which we do actually literally add something to this world. Unlike projectivism, it makes good on its metaphor.52

3.8 Truth and Progress

Now, neither norms of etiquette or social duties and ideals of excellence are part of the fabric of the world in the way that it would be characterized by physics,

51 For Bradley’s view, see ‘Ideal Morality’ in Ethical Studies; for Strawson’s, see ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideal’ in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays. 52 But might one not conceive of a social projectivism that can draw on some of the advantages of understanding the constitution of values as being done by a plural, rather than an individual, subject? It should be noted that even though they tend to write as if they have an individualist model in mind, Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen nowhere commit themselves to it and Rabinowicz has, in conversation, pointed out to me that he is perhaps more inclined towards a social model. Nevertheless, the key element of the projectivist position is still the idea that our projecting value over other possible worlds provides a rationale for taking seriously the value that we project in this world – which is simply the wrong way to go. What we need is an approach that enables us to understand how we literally add something to this world, and once we move in that direction we will end up with a constructivist rather than a projectivist position.

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but they are clearly vital components in the fabric of the social world. When making judgments about them it certainly seems fair to say that we express a variety of different attitudes. Yet, at the same time it would seem that when we do so judge, we still assert matters of fact. While the constitution of the social world indubitably involves our sentiments, it does not follow from this that the ethical proposition is simply an expression of sentiment. Rather, it would seem that once constituted, the social world contains facts for ethical propositions to be about. Given the sociality of human beings and the recursive nature of the attitudes involved in constituting these facts, there is no mystery in there being an essential connection between the world of values and norms and our sentiments and reactive attitudes. This social world is constituted in a way that weaves together the factual and the normative, especially since many of the concepts that are involved in constituting the social world are functional. For instance, we cannot understand what it means to be a policeman without understanding that certain things are marks of a good policeman and others marks of a bad one. For us living inside this social world there will be certain socially constituted facts that can reasonably be taken as quite plainly factual, but others will also have a deep deontic pull on us that makes it appropriate to speak of them, at the same time, as values. In order to navigate this social world and judge correctly in particular cases we must be in touch with our own sentiments, reactive attitudes, and other conative states that are important in constituting the social world. For a normal human being to reach conclusions about such matters is thus never a question of ‘mere’ apprehension, but neither is it not a matter of apprehension at all. We might not have any sixth sense with which we apprehend social facts, but we do still apprehend them. Of course, not all human beings always function normally. One’s mind might, for instance, be clouded by depression or some other form of accidie. It would however still seem that if such a person no longer cares about normative matters, he might still have a certain capability left for understanding the social world. For the non-expressivist the judgment of such a person is qua judgment just like the judgment of any other, but the expressivist must give a reading of it that understands it as radically different; it is certainly not expressive of a sentiment in the person who judges. Yet, I suspect that we would say that the problem with such a person is not that he has lost his knowledge of what is right and wrong, it is just that he is lacking in motivation. What this suggests is that while the act of asserting ethical propositions is something that is normally connected with expressing sentiments, it is still not essentially a matter of it. The constructivist interpretation of such lack of motivation is tied up with a specific hypothesis, namely that when we fail to be motivated by ethical

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knowledge then that is essentially a failure of sociality. Luckily, this is a quite reasonable hypothesis. Not only does the depressed person suffer from a failure of sociality, but so does the other figures usually considered in this context, the psychopath and the amoralist. We can thus conclude that there is little reason to insist on an expressivist reading of the ethical proposition; rather, we can have the essential connection between our sentiments and the normative on the level of the whole, i.e. we would have no system of values and norms without a system of sentiments, without having to say that this connection is necessary on the level of the individual ethical proposition. But are these aspects of the social world really normative in the sense that we are interested in here? After all, it would seem that even if they de facto guide our behavior, do they not still leave open the question of whether we really ought to do as they command? Does not the picture given here obliterate the difference between moral norms and positive law? Would we not say that the one has a kind of fundamental normativity that the other has not? Perhaps ‘fundamental’ must here be understood as having to do with a difference in depth, rather than being of some mysterious metaphysical kind. Many surface social facts are constituted in a way that connects them to formal institutions that can, if abiding by certain procedures, change them. Positive law is an example of this. Other aspects run deeper and do not fall under any such formal arrangements; indeed, they might even constitute the conditions of legitimacy of such arrangements. Perhaps one could understand moral values and norms as deep in this sense. Still, even though there is a difference in depth between different normative components of the social order, even the most pervasive of socially established values and norms might be challenged by single individuals. It also seems that when individuals do so, they might very well have a strong sense of being correct in spite of having views that run counter to common views. We should however keep in mind that the social order is incredibly complex. To put it bluntly, the normative world that we inhabit as social beings is a mess. Although some conservatives might perhaps dream of a lost social order in which everybody knew their place, i.e. had a robust sense of identity and of how they fitted into the larger social structures in which they were embedded, such dreams can at best be myths. There has never been and will never be a social order of this kind since the social world is not anything that has been designed by a single creator at a single point of time and then released into the natural world, it is something that has evolved over a long stretch of time, through countless actions and interactions and through an endless number of conflicts and contestations. Yet, it is also quite obvious that the social world is not an utter chaos; there is some structure to it. This combination of order and disorder makes the space of reasons essentially dynamic. Even while it is through an immense amount of

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shared attitudes and behavioral patterns that we constitute the social world and its values and norms, its messiness means there is room for exploration and even for what might reasonably by understood as discoveries. Naturally, the explorations that are in question here are not like those of Columbus or Magellan; it is rather a question of us, the creators of the social world, never being able to fully fathom all the possible implications of the ways in which we constitute this world. If we consider a few examples, like the abolishment of slavery and the emancipation of women, that we might consider as genuine steps forward (although especially in the latter case much still remains), then many people who lived at pivotal points of time in these processes might when they changed their minds have had a sense of having discovered something, even if they lived at those early stages where they were fairly alone in holding these progressive views. Nevertheless, even though they dissented from common opinion, is it not reasonable to understand them as drawing the implications of the values and norms that people in general were all already participating in constituting? Thus, there is the possibility of a sense of correctness, connected to an act of dissent, that can nevertheless be understood as validated by being possible to be traced back to that deeper sense of correctness that can be understood as constituted, and validated, through a harmony of attitudes and behavioral patterns. Even if social constructivism leaves this kind of ample room for argument, criticism, and even discoveries, can it really give us all we want? While I do think that I have tried to give as sympathetic an account of social constructivism as is possible, I cannot but feel that there is still something missing here. It does give a sound account of the immense mass of small things that make up the bulk of our normative lives, but certain values have a ‘feel’ that at least gives them an appearance of transcending any given concrete social order. There is an ideality about certain values that seems to escape the constructivist schema, basic moral values being the most obvious example, and it is difficult to see how social constructivism can capture this. Still, even if social constructivism does not, in the final analysis, deliver all that we would want, it is still an important part of a complete ethical theory since it makes sense of significant parts of the values and norms that we adhere to and it does so in a way that demystifies them, while still letting them retain a considerable authority. I also find that once this account of the majority of values and norms is in place it has a spillover effect: it renders values and norms in general less suspect. Or to put it differently, it shows how there is a perfectly good sense in which values and norms are part of the fabric of the world.

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4. Persons and the Space of Reasons

Reason is impelled by a tendency of its nature to go out beyond the field of its empirical employment, and to venture in a pure employment, by means of ideas alone, to the utmost limits of all knowledge, and not to be satisfied save through the completion of its course in [the apprehension of] a self-subsistent systematic whole. – Critique of Pure Reason, A797 / B825

On the account given in the previous chapter, values are on a metaphysical level inherently tied to the way that we, as human beings, function: without human beings, or some creatures with enough resemblance to us, the world would be normatively dead. What this suggests is that if we want to ground the universal validity of at least some values or reasons, we should turn to consider universal features about how we function as persons rather than to an investigation of the world as such. Furthermore, since values and reasons are matters that primarily play a role in practical reasoning, the obvious place to look when attempting such a project is into the nature of that aspect of the person that might be called the faculty of reason. This is the task that I will attempt in this chapter and in so doing I will try to lay the ground for the final two chapters, on happiness and morality respectively. I will however begin with considering the most significant challenge to the hope of grounding morality in the nature of reason, namely the Humean approach to the metaphysics of the person in general and to the nature of practical reason in particular. I will give some reasons for rejecting Humeanism in favor of an alternative approach. In the light of the flaws of the Humean position, I will then turn to outlining a Kantian metaphysics of the person and argue that such an approach leads to the endorsement of a view held by Sidgwick, namely that there is a dualism of practical reason. I contend that while this kind of dualism might seem unattractive on account of it leaving us with a picture of the agent as fundamentally split, it is still superior to a monistic theory.

4.1 Motivation and Normativity

Philosophical thinking about human motivation and practical reasoning has for some time been taking place under the aegis of a particular set of ideas which

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would seem to form a coherent whole. They might be differently formulated in different contexts and by different writers, but as a starting point for the discussion we can take, loosely formulated, these two main ideas: (i) The Humean theory of motivation: when we act we are driven by a combination of

some conative state which gives the original impulse for action and some cognitive state which directs this impulse in a certain direction.

(ii) Instrumentalism about normative reasons: what we ought to do has only to do with

how to best achieve what we want and not about what we ought to want in the first place.

It is easy to see how these can be thought to fit together. If action is desire-driven it would seem only natural to understand the cognitive part of the process, i.e. the part that might be conceived of as practical reasoning, as concerned with simply ascertaining the best means to achieve that which one already wants. That there should be two theories in this way might also seem quite appropriate since this corresponds to an ambiguity in the notion of a ‘reason’ that has been pointed out by a number of writers, namely between motivating reasons and normative ones. Given that we operate with this duality, it is certainly neat if we can conceive of reasons in the normative sense in a way that matches reasons in the motivating sense. On the other hand, what we get on the traditional understanding of the instrumentalism associated with Humeanism is a very thin version of practical reasoning, so thin that it might in fact be wondered whether it leaves us with an account according to which practical reasoning is normative at all. After all, on the Humean account, in saying that something is rational we are not giving any first-order justification of a certain choice, we are simply making a claim about a relation between means and ends. This also means that in issuing a judgment about a certain course of action being irrational, we are not issuing any kind of genuine reproach. We are simply saying that given the goal this person is trying to achieve, this specific action will not accomplish it at lesser cost than another alternative open for him. And that is all. Given that one would want to sort out our linguistic practices with respect to notions like ‘reason’ and ‘rational’ this could seem like an unfortunate result. Allan Gibbard has, for instance, objected to the purely instrumental conception of rationality in much the same way that expressivists have objected to naturalist understandings of moral notions, namely that it does not capture the commendative force of judgments about the rationality of actions. Gibbard,

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accordingly, suggests a non-cognitivist analysis of rationality instead.1 While this is not the place to go into the details of Gibbard’s view, it is still interesting to note that philosophers have tended to be much more relaxed about naturalizing standards of rationality than standards of morality. If we look at the way we use notions like ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ in everyday discourse it is quite clear that we use them in much more diverse ways than in standard philosophical usage. This need not deter philosophers from letting us all know what ‘rationality’ is really about, but it does perhaps give us some reason to pause and consider exactly what it is that a philosopher is offering when laying out a theory about reason in general and practical reason in particular. Though not a Humean in the traditional sense, Gibbard is actually a good example of a philosopher who approaches ethics in a way similar to Hume himself, namely in trying to understand rationality and morality as human phenomena and therefore not being foreign to the idea of mixing conceptual analyses with arguments and ideas from sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. Many others, who also labor in the Humean tradition, do however still want to distinguish sharply between motivating and normative reasons, even though it would actually seem that on a more strict Humean picture the very notion of ‘normative reasons’ is a puzzling one. To a certain extent, this might be due the fact that there is an additional ambiguity at work here, namely that ‘normative reasons’ might be understood both as what Thomas Scanlon calls ‘operative reasons’,2 i.e. what the agent takes as reasons for doing what she does, and what might be called ‘justifying reasons’, i.e. reasons that actually justify what the agent does. The bona fide Humean might possibly allow that there are such things as operative reasons (indeed it seems hard to deny that there are such things although, as we shall later see, the existence of them might not be readily compatible with the Humean theory of motivation) and we might, of course, then go on to study the way in which people feel a need to justify their actions and how certain features are used by them in trying to do this, but what we can never say is that they are really justified since in that kind of robust sense there is no such thing as normativity. Seeing this might help to understand just how radical strict Humeanism is. In one of his most famous passages Hume pointed out how one cannot go from a simple ‘is’ to an ‘ought’,3 i.e. from a set of strictly descriptive premises we cannot draw a normative conclusion. What this means is that from the following two premises:

1 Ibid., Chapter 1. 2 What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 19. 3 Treatise, p. 469.

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(P1) I have a desire for x. (P2) The most efficient means to get x is to φ. I cannot draw the conclusion ‘I ought to φ’. Of course, given that I actually desire x, then it is very likely that my holding (P2) to be true, will cause me to actually φ. But there is nothing (robustly) normative about it. We might of course say things like ‘If you want to have x, then you ought to φ’, but we are then issuing statements that are simply mock-normative in that they are translatable in an uncomplicated way to a set of purely descriptive set of statements about means-end relations. Given the ambiguity involved in the notion of a ‘normative reason’, one might perhaps wonder whether instrumentalists about normative reasons are not simply trying to have it both ways, on the one hand chastising the categorical normativity of Kantianism as mysterious, while on the other still wanting to be able to talk about what we really ought to do.4 The problem is that to say that we ought to do what will best satisfy our desires is to introduce a substantive norm from out of nowhere. Accordingly, rather than underpinning instrumentalism, a bona fide Humeanism would seem to undermine it, and if we want to say that we really do have reason to do what will best satisfy our desires, we still owe an account that makes sense of the normativity involved in this. There is also an additional problem with the combination of the Humean theory of motivation and instrumentalism, namely that normativity would seem to require some deliberative gap between what we want to do and what we ought to do; and if what we ought to do simply tracks what we want to do the most, this gap collapses: we ought to do whatever it is that we want to do. It should however be pointed out that instrumentalism is in fact just a member of a larger family of theories about normative reasons, what might be called internalist theories. A leading internalist, Bernard Williams, has presented the following criterion for it being true that A has a reason to φ: A has a reason to φ only if he could reach the conclusion to φ by a sound deliberative route from the motivations he already has.5 As it stands, being only a necessary condition, this is rather to be understood as a constraint on what can count as being a reason for an agent rather than a full-scale theory about what actually are

4 Cf. Christine Korsgaard, ‘The Normativity of Instrumental Reason’ in Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (eds.), Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Jean Hampton, The Authority of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5 ‘Internalism and the Obscurity of Blame’ in Making Sense Of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35.

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an agent’s reasons. As we can see, this formulation creates a certain gap between what a person actually desires at the time of acting and what he has reasons for doing. This means that one can have a reason, in the internal sense, to do something without being aware of the fact that one has such a reason and without being affected by that reason. As already noted, that there is some such gap is clearly a must for something to be an account of normative reasons. More precisely, what this kind of broad formulation opens up for is a distinct form of normativity, namely what can be called the pragmatic oughtness of good advice. Take one of Williams’ own examples: A person desires to drink gin and tonic. He has a bottle in front of him. He believes that it contains gin, but in fact, it contains petrol. Williams points out that ‘it is just very odd to say that he has a reason to drink this stuff, and it is natural to say that he has no reason to drink although he thinks that he has’.6 This is the kind of situation where there is room for someone to be in a position to say things that must count as good advice to the person who is about to act. Williams is clear about the fact that one’s subjective motivational set can include a vast diversity of things, ‘such as dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal loyalties, and various projects’7, but his position is still one according to which certain things might be resolutely sorted out as irrelevant considerations since internalism about reasons still leaves us with what might called an agent-centered conception of the space of reasons in which we move when we deliberate. To borrow another example from Williams, when Owen Wingrave’s parents think that their son has good reason to join the army (because of the family tradition and so on) there is clearly a routine internalist take on this situation according to which they are simply wrong (because there is no inclination towards the military life in Owen’s subjective motivational set). It is an open question whether there are certain things that just happen to be part of everyone’s motivational set and Williams’ internalist requirement does accordingly not rule out that certain moral norms have universal validity. Nevertheless, to many people, internalism about normative reasons might still seem to threaten the authority of morality. They might find that we should not have to look into the motivational sets of people to know whether they have reason to follow the norms of morality, that is something we simply have. An example of this would be Derek Parfit who does not see the normative reasons that we have as connected to our motivational sets, but to irreducible normative

6 ‘Internal and External Reasons’ in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 102. 7 Ibid., p. 105.

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truths8 and who follows this up with the further claim that ‘normative truths are of a distinctive kind, which we should not expect to be like ordinary empirical truths’.9 This seems to amount to a very sturdy brand of moral realism, which of course means that he shoulders a rather heavy metaphysical burden. How are we to look for these special normative facts? There is an obvious risk here that if reasons are not to be anchored in our motivations they will have to be anchored in some kind of intuitions instead and we will perhaps risk landing in the kind of position chastised by Mackie, except that it is framed in terms of reasons rather than values. On the other hand, as already pointed out in connection with instrumentalism, it is difficult to see how the internalist can fully escape the problems faced by the externalist. While it is easy to accept that there is such a thing as the pragmatic oughtness of good advice, it becomes more difficult to see how this should be worked out in detail. The moment that we introduce a gap between what I want at the moment of action and what I should want, we will necessarily also introduce a specification of what makes this gap come into existence; and if we are to do this in a systematic way we will end up introducing some form of idealized conditions that inevitably embody certain norms. Williams suggests some idealizing conditions and he is followed by Michael Smith, who wants to draw more far-reaching consequences from them.10 Another example in the same vein is Richard Brandt’s ideal of cognitive psychotherapy.11 In addition to sneaking certain norms in through the backdoor, such proposals can also usually be criticized for being vague and thus not giving us a good enough picture of what reasons we will actually end up with (in all but trivial cases it is far from obvious where these educational procedures, which we in the real world never go through anyway, will take us). And then there is also the further problem that the more advanced and comprehensive these ideal procedures are, the more one is removed from the intuitive plausibility of internalism about reasons: if the reasons I end up with are too different from the wants in my own present motivational set, it becomes difficult to see why I should care especially about what, for instance, some very different ideal version of myself would want, even if there is a long and winding educational path to that state. If any attempt to work out a general conception of the oughtness of good advice will involve the introduction of norms that run counter to the bona fide

8 ‘Reason and Motivation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 71 (1997), pp. 108-9. 9 Ibid., p. 121. 10 The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), Chapter 5. 11 A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

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naturalist Humean project, this means that the difference between internalists and externalists about reasons should not be understood as a difference between anti-realism and realism, but between two realist approaches. Furthermore, on both accounts it is quite possible that moral norms lack an adequate grounding – although internalism about reasons does certainly look as a more obvious candidate for leading to moral anti-realism. This means that externalism seems to be more attractive for the would-be moral realist; but it is not a position without difficulties. While it might be the case that even internalism about normative reasons is not a part of the strict Humean project, it would still seem that internalism is a position that is compatible with the Humeans theory of motivation since the pragmatic oughtness of good advice is certainly grounded in the fact that the things that might be cited as advice in this sense would tend to speak to us as beings of desire rather than on a more strictly cognitive level. If we want to break the appeal of internalism, it would thus seem that we should focus on breaking the appeal of the Humean theory of motivation and its demotion of reason to being no more than the handmaiden of desire.

4.2 The Humean Theory of Motivation

Before going into the so-called Humean theory of motivation that would seem to be the natural companion to an internalist conception of reasons for action a few clarifications should be made. To begin with: Just as ‘Kantian ethics’ need not mean ‘Kant’s ethics’, ‘the Humean theory of motivation’ need not mean ‘Hume’s theory of motivation’. Just as the interest I take in Kant here is primarily philosophical rather than exegetical, so is the case with the interest I take in Hume. I have no interest in trying to establish what the Humean theory of motivation really consists in and what its exact relation to Hume’s writings are. Rather, I will rest content with drawing a distinction between two ways in which one could be a Humean; the first one is reminiscent of Hume himself, while the second is an attempt to capture contemporary Humeanism, of which the early Donald Davidson and, more recently, Michael Smith might be taken as examples. At any rate, here are the two varieties of Humeanism that I will discuss: (i) The Reason-Passion Model: There are two parts of the human mind involved in

action: reason and the passions. Reason is separate from our motivations and has exclusively to do with information processing. Reason is thus motivationally inert and can only show the ways in which the motivational force of the passions can be released into action.

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(ii) The Belief-Desire Model: There are two mental states involved in action. On the

one hand, there are beliefs, states that purport to represent the world as it is. On the other hand, there are desires, states that represent how the world is to be. Effective motivation is grounded in desire, although it can be channeled through means-end beliefs.

Even though there is a key idea that unites these two models, the separateness of the cognitive and the motivational, there is still a difference in the way that they are framed. While the reason-passion model takes it stand on a macro level, the belief-desire model does it on micro level. While the reason-passion model is faculty-oriented, the belief-desire model is oriented towards mental states. It is of course possible to subscribe to both the belief-desire model and the reason-passion model (a metaphysics of the human mind can clearly contain both faculties and mental states), but it should be made clear that accepting one of them does not commit one to accepting the other, although the relation between them is surely asymmetrical in the sense that while it is difficult to see how a faculty-oriented approach could do without mental states, an approach oriented towards mental states might very well do without postulating any faculties. Additionally, if we look at the belief-desire model, there are two important ways of further developing it and we need to distinguish between these. That the notion of ‘desire’ is often a useful one and that desire plays a key role in human motivation is clear, but that is something many anti-Humeans would acknowledge as well. The question is rather how we are to understand the precise place and role of desire in practical deliberation: (i) The Path Thesis: Whenever a person intentionally performs an action the

primary motivating reason consists in a desire and an appropriate means-end belief.

(ii) The Source Thesis: Whenever a person intentionally performs an action the

founding motivating reason is a desire the motivating force of which is channeled towards the action in question via appropriate means-end beliefs.

It should be noted that the first position, which is roughly the one adhered to by Davidson in his classic essay ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, is quite compatible with the original source of motivation lying in reason alone. In contrast to this, Hume’s own position is of a stronger kind, as is made clear in one of his most well-known and quoted passages:

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Ask a man why he uses exercise; he will answer, because he desires to keep his health. If you then enquire, why he desires health, he will readily reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your enquiries farther, and desire a reason, why he hates pain, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object.12

Here we see how a chain of passions can be unraveled until we reach a basic passion that rests on nothing. But one could certainly grant that desire is part of what constitutes one’s primary motivating reason and still imagine a similar chain, ending in something like a dictate of pure practical reason. While for many contemporary anti-Humeans it is the belief-desire model that is the focus of their attention, this is not the case with the Kantian, since for the Kantian it is the status of reason as a faculty that is at stake and if we consider the belief-desire model from a Kantian perspective the important question is to what extent it stands in the way of a more robust conception of reason than the one exemplified by the reason-passion model. However, even if we do not want to postulate such a faculty, we could still accept the Path Thesis and distinguish, as Thomas Nagel does, between motivated and unmotivated desires – where the former are consequences of our coming to recognize something as being justified.13 Even though modern-day Humeans might like to distance themselves from Hume’s own brand of faculty psychology, it still seems clear that if Humeanism is to present a real challenge to externalism about normative reasons, it must embrace the Source Thesis. Together with it, the belief-desire model rules out the kind of more robust conception of reason that the Kantian would like to have. This also means that one way to argue against this position is to claim that we have grounds for accepting a fuller account of reason than is allowed by this combination. Before doing so, I would however like to first mention some methodological concerns. The Humean theory of motivation is somewhat of the philosophical default position, but at least the reason-passion model is also a theory that one might expect most people would find quite startling when they first become acquainted with it, and the reason is that the Humean idea that reason is motivationally inert runs against the commonly held view that there is an inherent tension between reason and our inclinations. Indeed, most people would probably say that they have at times experienced a battle between reason and passion. Hume does of course deliver an alternative account of such phenomenological observations (in terms of a battle between calm and violent passions), but this does not remove the fact that as a metaphysician of what it means to be a person, Hume surely 12 An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Appendix I, § 18. 13 The Possibility of Altruism, pp. 29-30.

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belongs to the revisionary camp, as does any contemporary Humean who embraces the Source Thesis. It should also be pointed out that just because a philosopher sounds as if he or she is saying something controversial, his or her actual position need not contain anything that really is genuinely radical and subversive. This might sound trivial, but the point is just that whenever a philosopher says something that sounds controversial there is reason to be especially wary since controversial points usually turn out to be based on shifts in the use of key terminology. It is far too easy to take a notion used more or less in everyday life, analyze it in a way that in effect alters its meaning, and then pronounce that people are confused because they use the notion as they do. Once such terminological matters are sorted out, the controversial might very well turn out to be quite trivial. Revisionism, if it is to be viable, must rely on more than mere assertion. For instance, just because Hume says that ‘[r]eason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’,14 that does not mean that he is right and, however eloquent he is, it had better not be the case that his well-known slogan is based merely on the bare stipulation of another account of reason than the one that lies implicit in our everyday thought and practices. This being said, the question to be considered now is whether the Humean theory of motivation presents a good way of conceptualizing the mind on matters of motivation and action. I hope to show that it does not.

4.3 Reason and Deliberation

While both Humeans and Kantians might speak of a faculty of reason, there is today still a tendency to avoid speaking in terms of faculties. It should however be pointed out that if we as descriptive metaphysicians choose to understand what it means to be a person partially in terms of faculties, we do so because there are certain kinds of operations and processes that occur in our daily life and which can helpfully be summarized in terms of these faculties. Of course, the Humean should probably be understood as a revisionary metaphysician and it is perhaps a little more plausible to interpret the revisionist as needing a somewhat more robust form of faculty psychology, one that is committed, in some appropriately stronger sense, to the psychological reality of the faculties in question. At any rate, one question that might be raised with respect to the Humean account of reason is whether the purity of this faculty is really matched by a 14 Treatise, p. 415

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purity in the kind of processes with respect to which it can be meaningful to speak of a distinct faculty of reason at all. This charge against Hume goes back at least to T. H. Green who rejects the idea that there are distinct processes of reasoning completely disengaged from desire or affect. There is no purely speculative thinking, just as little as there is any purely practical thinking:

The exercise of the one activity is always a necessary accompaniment of the other. In all exercise of the understanding desire is at work. The result of any process of cognition is desired throughout it. No man learns to know anything without desiring to know it. The presentation of a fact which does not on the first view fit itself into any of our established theories of the world, awakens a desire for such adjustment, which may be effected either further acquaintance with the relations of the fact, or by a modification of our previous theories, or by a combination by both processes.15

Green’s idea is that reason or understanding cannot be purely representational. In sorting through and sorting out the information we get through our senses, motivational elements are constantly, and necessarily, at work. A distinct faculty of reason that would be purely speculative and motivationally inert is an impossibility, for such a faculty would be cognitively inert as well. This does not mean that we cannot distinguish between practical and speculative thinking: we desire and we understand, but in Green’s words ‘we must not imagine Desire and Intellect, as our phraseology sometimes misleads us into doing, to be separate agents or influences’.16 If we speak, as we do, of certain individuals as being endowed with reason then this should not be taken as if there is within this creature’s mind, or indeed brain, a distinct module that other creatures lack, but where everything else is pretty much the same. Instead, we should take it to mean that this individual’s mind in general operates in certain ways that justify ascribing ‘reason’ to it. At the very least, a necessary presupposition for a mind to have reason is that it is self-conscious. It is also a mind that has concepts, i.e. a creature with reason is not only capable of perceiving, it is capable of perceiving-as. It is able not just plainly to see an object and respond to what it is sees in a purely instinctive manner, but to see the object as something, e.g. to see the tree as a tree. Such a capacity enables it to distinguish between reality and appearance. While the Kantian emphasizes the reflexivity of the human mind, the Humean tends to neglect it. Since we have already seen, in the previous chapter, how the experience of freedom is tied up with this reflexivity, it should not come as any surprise that an account that neglects this aspect will have difficulties in

15 Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), § 134, p. 151. 16 Ibid., § 129, p. 146.

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making sense of the way in which we sometimes decide what to believe. Not that we are able to simply decide that we should believe whatever we wish, but there are clearly cases where we have different alternatives which are all supported by some evidence and where we have to decide what to believe. When we talk like Humeans about beliefs, things sound as if a ready-made billiard ball, not p, just comes rolling into the mind, knocking away another billiard ball, p; but things are not that simple. The mind is not merely some passive receptacle. There are matters of interpretation and weighing of evidence involved in many instances of coming to believe things, and even if these processes are not explicit, as a being of reason they are still implicit in my thinking. Hume bluntly states that ‘[r]eason is the discovery of truth or falsehood. Truth or falsehood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact.’17 If this account were to be true only true beliefs would be reasonable and while it might be plausible to claim that if a belief is to count as knowledge it must be true, such a demand seems excessive when it comes to the question of whether a particular belief is reasonable or not. Surely, that is a matter of the evidence. Accordingly, if reason is to be identified as a distinct faculty, and even if we are to understand it as narrowly occupied with only beliefs, then its operations should be understood as concerned with assessing and weighing together reasons for believing one thing rather than another. Although it might be a bit construed to speak, as Green does, in terms of desires as playing a role in processes of reasoning, there is still in such processes a linkage between reasons and aspects that might in a very broad sense be called motivational. When I finally reach the conclusion that a certain belief is justified, then, if my mind is functioning properly, that belief will force itself on me. The very thought that something is justified will have something which can be likened with a motivational pull. Indeed, certain instances of coming to believe are quite action-like: they might concern accepting an unwelcome conclusion and the sense in which I then feel committed to embrace the conclusion is very similar to obligation. For a being to be governed by reason does not merely mean that she mechanically adopts certain beliefs but that she wonders what she is justified in believing and insofar as a certain belief is justified then she adopts it – or, to put it differently: in a being governed by reason, her beliefs track the way she judges that she is justified in believing. Of course, in a similar way, if we allow this kind of role for reason we should be able to say that in a being governed by reason, her desires track the way that she judges that she has reason to desire (or perhaps better: to act).

17 Treatise, p. 458.

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The difference here spans both the theoretical and the practical; Hume is a representative of an empiricism which has a picture of the human subject as at root a passive observer, as essentially just taking in a ready-made world, while Kant is a representative of a constructivist tradition who sees human subjects as engaged in actively shaping the life-world in which they conduct their affairs. It is clear that the ground for the non-role of Humean reason in the practical sphere is laid in its modest role in the theoretical sphere. Since the conclusion to be drawn from the above is that Hume’s picture of reason as a distinct and motivationally inert faculty is deeply flawed and must be rejected in favor of a more robust conception, it should come as no surprise if such a conception also would allow for a more active role for reason in the practical sphere. However, as should be quite apparent, the critique à la Green that can be directed against Hume is specifically directed towards the reason-passion model, not the belief-desire model. The adherents of the latter could very well admit that beliefs and desires are both inextricably involved in processes of speculative as well as practical thinking, but insist that the individual states themselves are either purely cognitive or purely motivational. In contrast to the reason-passion model, with its insistence on reason as incapable of getting into a conflict with passion, the belief-desire model is hardly as unsettling to common sense. Indeed, at least initially, many would probably find it quite commonsensical. This does however not mean that it is without difficulties and an initial problem has to do with characterizing the very states of mind the model utilizes: beliefs and desires – what is the difference between them? The most common way of drawing this distinction is in terms of so-called ‘directions of fit’ concerning the proposition that gives them content. Desires aim to make the world fit in accordance with their propositional content, whereas beliefs aim to fit themselves in accordance with the world. This way of putting things does however run the risk of making it sound as if beliefs and desires are some kind of mini-agents and it is probably somewhat too metaphorical. Yet, the main point of ‘directions of fit’ talk can be made in a less metaphorical way. According to Michael Smith the difference between a belief and desire amounts to

a difference in the counterfactual dependence of a belief that p and a desire that p on a perception with the content that not p: a belief that p tends to go out of existence in the presence of a perception with the content that not p, whereas a desire that p tends to endure, disposing the subject in that state to bring it about that p.18

18 Ibid., p. 115.

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The use of the word ‘tends’ is to be noted. It is quite clear that often when we believe that p and perceive that not p, the belief that p does not simply go out of existence, it might take many such perceptions – and perhaps even some further evidence if it is a matter of a strongly held belief. Likewise, a perception that not p can sometimes cause a desire that p to go away (for instance when one has tried one’s best to achieve p and then discovers that not p). This does not mean that Smith’s view is wrong, only that there are many modes of functioning that reside in the background of the mind and yet are still presuppositions for much else that goes on in it; as long as such matters are not fully explicated, it is very difficult to evaluate just what this view of beliefs and desires really implies. Now, Smith himself does briefly comment on a suggestion made by Philip Pettit that we need to distinguish between desires and habits of inference,19 the idea being that the latter, such as drawing conclusions in accordance with modus ponens, are not beliefs but cannot simply be subsumed under ‘desires’ either. Smith’s response20 is that instead of seeing habits of inference as something separate, they should be seen as internal to the dispositions that constitute beliefs. He speaks of ‘packages of dispositions’ as constitutive of believing and desiring. Now, assume that a person, or perhaps a tortoise, believes that p→q and believes that p, but does not believe that q. What would we say about such a person? My suggestion is that we would say that his powers of reasoning are defective, but Smith must say that it is his beliefs that are defective.21 Which belief: that p→q or that p, or both? Surely, Smith’s analysis simply gets too construed at this point. The only reasonable recourse is to accept that we cannot reduce everything in the mind to beliefs and desires. There is a background of mental mechanisms for managing them: principles of thinking that govern the thought of a being in possession of reason. However, if we grant this then we will also have to grant that even though most beliefs are motivationally inert and can only influence action together with some desire, some beliefs may very well have the capacity to influence action without getting any help from antecedent desires but in working together only with the background of mental managing mechanisms (which we might perhaps, somewhat like Green, speak of in terms of desires, but of which such talk would be a bit artificial). I would say that there is a particular class of beliefs that fit in with this, namely what might be called

19 The Common Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp 18-9. 20 Ibid., pp. 209-10. 21 Actually, Smith uses the phrase ‘defective believer’, but given his line of analysis he should speak of defective beliefs instead. If there is to be any point to his way of analyzing motivation he should be able to accomplish it using only micro-level notions like beliefs and desires, not resorting to macro-level notions like ‘believer’.

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‘reason beliefs’,22 i.e. beliefs that there is something which speaks in favor or against something. This class contains thoughts that move a being of reason because of the principles according to which such a mind operates.

4.4 Explanation, Rationalization, and Justification

Let us step back somewhat. Before saying anything about which theory of motivation that we should adopt, it would seem fair to ask what it is that we look for in a theory of motivation. To begin with, it seems plain enough that a theory of motivation should be useful in explaining people’s actions. Of course, we can explain actions in a number of different ways. We might for instance give an account of a person’s childhood, pointing to how certain factors there initiated the causal chain that led to her present action. Alternatively, we could perhaps, if we had sophisticated enough instruments, give an account in terms of certain electro-chemical occurrences in the person’s brain. While explanations like these would certainly allow us to understand actions, at least at times, there is still something that seems to be lacking in them. They treat the person in question as an automaton and her actions like any other events – perhaps as events the full explanation of which is a very complex matter, and thus very difficult, but still as plain events. We do however tend to see actions as a special category of events. Briefly put, the main difference would seem to be that whereas other events simply happen, actions are such that there is a perspective on them from the point of view of the preceding link in the causal chain, the person who chooses and performs the action. Explanatory usefulness can hardly give a theory of motivation more than a place in the philosophical toolbox, so it would seem that we want something more. A possible suggestion here is that a philosophical theory of motivation should make sense of the intentionality that characterizes much of human action. It is fairly clear how the belief-desire model could be understood to provide a schema for intentional action since citing a fitting belief-desire pair for an action makes it intelligible as a purposive action, it rationalizes the action. Thus, what makes something into a theory of motivation, in this sense, is that it attempts to give explanations in terms of reasons, and ‘reasons’ are here conceived of as the agent’s reasons for acting as she does. Such reasons make sense of an action in a way that other explanations, e.g. neuro-physiological, do not. They make the action into something more than a causally explicated event: they make it reasonable. Davidson puts it as follows:

22 Cf. David McNaughton and Eve Garrard, ‘Mapping Moral Motivation’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1 (1998), p. 48.

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A reason rationalizes an action only if it leads us to see something the agent saw, or thought he saw, in his action – some feature, consequence, or aspect of the action the agent wanted, desired, prized, held dear thought dutiful, beneficial, obligatory, or agreeable. We cannot explain why someone did what he did simply by saying the particular action appealed to him; we must indicate what it was about the action that appealed.23

It should be noted that when Davidson formulates his theory he does so in opposition to writers who do not see rationalization as a form of causal explanation.24 The reason why one could be disinclined to believe this is that one sees rationalization as strongly tied to matters of justification and since the relation between justifying reasons is logical rather than causal, it might seem to be a category mistake to think of rationalization as a form of causal explanation. Yet, it is also easy to see why one might want to go along with Davidson in understanding rationalization as a species of causal explanation. After all, we are going to have a variety of causal explanations anyway and if rationalization is simply one of them it saves us the trouble of drawing the philosophical map to include other, categorically different, ways of making actions intelligible. There is also the apparent fact that we tend to see our deliberations as having causal power. At the same time, it is however not difficult to form suspicions about the Davidsonian project: in trying to formulate a model that is to be both a species of causal explanation and that qualifies as rationalization, one might wonder if it will not fail to fully be one, or perhaps even both, of them. With respect to the question of causal efficacy, we run into problems about the mind-body problem and mental causation, problems that we can perhaps steer clear of if we understand rationalization as something very different. Nevertheless, what I would like to focus on here is the issue of whether the belief-desire model really provides a good schema for rationalizing actions. What about practical reason – does the Davidsonian position imply an instrumentalist picture? It would seem that it does not since, even if Davidson uses a notion like ‘rationalization’, his is not a theory about whether these reasons are good or not. It does not presuppose instrumentalism, although it is of course a theory that fits well with it. This does however raise an interesting question, namely where the notion of ‘rationalization’ should be fitted in if it would turn out that rationalization is not best understood as a form of causal

23 ‘Action, Reasons, and Causes’ in Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd Ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 3. 24 This idea was at the time prevalent among post-Wittgensteinian philosophers of action, the chief representative being Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1957).

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explanation. Many writers on the subject operate with a distinction between two kinds of reasons, explanatory (or motivating) and justificatory (or normative). On a loosely Humean position the latter are counterparts of the former, which of course means that they are similar to them in content. For instance, when Michael Smith states that ‘normative reasons are propositions of the general form “A’s φ-ing is desirable or required”’25, this is something he does without much argument or indeed without much consideration of alternatives. However, when you consider the matter, it seems obvious that this is not what normative reasons look like. If anything, the kind of general proposition identified by Smith is the conclusion of a process of practical reasoning, the kind of judgment for or against which normative reasons are offered. Of course, we certainly say things like ‘I have reason to φ’, and such judgments might perhaps be understood as judgments to the point that φ-ing is desirable, but are not normative reasons supposed to be able to be input into our practical deliberation rather than the outcome of it? 26 Now consider Davidson:

Corresponding to the belief and attitude of a primary reason for an action, we can always construct (with a little ingenuity) the premises of a syllogism from which it follows that the action has some (as Anscombe calls it) ‘desirability characteristic’. Thus there is a certain irreducible – though somewhat anemic – sense in which every rationalization justifies: from the agent’s point of view there was, when he acted, something to be said for the action.27

How should we understand this ‘something to be said for the action’ other than that from the agent’s point of view there were certain reasons for performing the action, reasons that belong to a wholly different category from both the fact that he had a certain belief and a certain desire or from the judgment that the action was desirable. It would seem, then, that Davidsonian primary reasons only rationalize an action insofar as there are these other reasons in the light of which the action was seen as the thing to do from the point of view of the agent. Warren Quinn has provided an instructive example of a case where all we have is a brute desire that might certainly be used to explain a person’s actions but does nothing to rationalize them. The example is about a man who has a

25 Ibid., p. 96. 26 Only a few paragraphs down from the place where Smith analyses what it is to be a normative reason, he slides to talking about having reason to φ, The Moral Problem, p. 97. This is clearly a slide from talking about the input, normative reasons, in the deliberative process to the output, what we have reason to do. 27 Ibid., p. 9.

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strong urge to turn on radios whenever he encounters them. He does however not want to hear anything on the radio; he is just simply disposed to turn them on.28 Clearly, in such cases, pro-attitudes paired with means-end beliefs can do little to rationalize the behavior in question. While Hume has accustomed philosophers to the idea that there are loose ends at the top of people’s deliberative hierarchies, these blind top desires are usually thought to be for things like pleasure, i.e. things that few would dispute are worthwhile to pursue. Such desires also tend to be quite general and the desire to turn on radios is clearly different in this sense, but from the Humean perspective this cannot be the vital difference since there is nothing in the Humean approach that necessitates that our blind desires should be general. It is just that, statistically at least, highly specific desires normally tend to be circumstantial rather than standing ones. Quinn’s example showcases a person that has a standing desire, but where we find that something is wrong since the object of this desire is not logically connected to other features in the space of reasons: it just is. Consider again, for a moment, Hume’s famous passage in the Enquiry:

Ask a man why he uses exercise; he will answer, because he desires to keep his health. If you then enquire, why he desires health, he will readily reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your enquiries farther, and desire a reason, why he hates pain, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object.

This susceptibility to why-question is surely characteristic of the kind of behavior that we call intentional,29 but there is nevertheless an ambiguity in Hume’s example. On a bona fide Humean account, the links in the chain leading from the general to the specific are psychological, i.e. they trace a causal flow of motivating power from the general to the specific, but when you read the text it is easy to read it as being about a person who gives reasons as to why he is justified in desiring certain things, and while the relation between exercise and health is causal, the relation between the value of health and the value of exercise can surely not be understood as causal, but must be understood as logical. If we then ask what rationalizes the action, the only reasonable answer would be that it is this logical chain rather than any causal story about how some basic desire has caused another desire that has caused another desire and how finally a desire together with an appropriate means-end belief has caused some action of the agent. Were the latter the case there should be no problem with rationalization in Quinn’s example, but there clearly is.

28 ‘Putting Rationality in its Place’ in Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 236-37. 29 Cf. Anscombe, Intention, § 5.

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One might, thus, wonder whether Davidsonian explanations really amount to anything more than elliptical rationalizations: they often suffice because when considering normal people we can, once we know what they desire, always ‘fill in’ an appropriate set of reasons grounding the desire. Remember that these explanations are supposed to be rationalizations and it seems reasonable that part of the rationalizing force of citing belief-desire pairs is that they imply that there are what Anscombe calls desirability characteristics. Of course, normally we need not cite these (just as we need not always cite both the belief and the desire), but when they are not there, it would seem that we have an incomplete form of rationalization. There is still a sense in which the behavior in question is purposive, but if it is not a matter of rationalizable behavior then it becomes questionable what it is that the Davidsonian model captures. Given this it seems reasonable to classify, as Thomas Scanlon does, normal desires as judgment-sensitive attitudes, i.e. as ‘attitudes that an ideally rational person would come to have whenever that person judged there to be sufficient reasons for them and that would, in an ideally rational person, “extinguish” when that person judged them not to be supported by reasons of the appropriate kind.’30 The problem with internalism about normative reasons is that it gets things the wrong way around. Indeed, Williams himself has actually made a similar complaint, together with Amartya Sen, in a discussion of those welfare economists that base values on choices:

It is not by any means unreasonable to respond to the question: ‘What should I choose?’, by answering, ‘Whatever is most valuable’. But to respond to the question, ‘What is most valuable?’, or even ‘What is most valuable to me?’, by answering, ‘Whatever I would choose’, would seem to remove the content from the notion of valuing, even when qualifications are added to the supposed choice in the form of ‘under ideal conditions’ or ‘with full understanding’. Basing choice on valuation is cogent in a way that basing valuation on choice is not. 31

The quandary put forward in this passage is reminiscent of the question put to Euthyphro by Socrates: ‘Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?’32 With respect to Williams the question can be put as ‘Is something a sound normative reason because the fully rational person would be motivated to act upon it, or would the fully

30 Ibid., p. 20. 31 ‘Introduction: Utilitarianism and Beyond’, in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds.), Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 12-13. 32 Euthyphro, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 10a1-3.

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rational person be motivated to act upon it because it is a sound normative reason?’ The idea is that the link between value and choice has been inverted by many welfare economists and although Williams’ discussion on internal reasons is framed in terms of reasons rather than values, it is difficult to see that the same basic point does not apply to it as well. Of course, once we drop the idea that the Davidsonian theory provides a model for the rationalization of actions, there is little attraction left to it since as a mode of explaining actions citing a Davidsonian primary reason is not really much of an explanation. To answer ‘Why did X turn the dial on that radio?’ with ‘Because he had a desire to turn on the radio and a belief that turning the dial would accomplish this’ does not amount to much. All it adds, apart from that which I can already have observed, is that there was no misunderstanding – he did not for instance want a drink and believe that he would get it by turning the dial: he just wanted to do what I saw him do. It would in fact seem that in the case of blind desires the only way to make them intelligible is by other forms of explanation, e.g. psychoanalytical or neuro-physiological. To sort things out, I think it would be useful to move away from the binary distinction between two kinds of reasons and to distinguish between three different kinds instead and that we understand these as corresponding to three different modes of accounting for actions. The three modes are: (i) explanation, (ii) rationalization, and (iii) justification. The crucial category here is the second, since the two other are fairly straightforward: explanatory reasons cite features the relations between which are causal and justifying reasons cite features the relations between which are logical. I would suggest that accounts of rationalization will tend towards grouping rationalization together with one of the other two modes. We can go both ways, but as we have seen, the Davidsonian model suffers from severe difficulties and it would thus seem reasonable to draw our understanding of rationalization towards the justificatory pole (and thus understand as logical the relations between the features cited in rationalizations). What this means is that we should understand the features cited by bona fide rationalizations as what Scanlon calls an agent’s operative reasons, entities which in a normally functioning human being always lay claim to being good reasons; although since there is the possibility of a gap between what an agent takes as constituting a good reason and what actually is one, there is room to distinguish between the merely operative and truly justifying reasons. Of course, the notion of justification occupies a key constitutive role in setting up the space of reasons within which we move not only as speculative thinkers but as agents as well. To judge that something is right is precisely to judge that it is justified. I have already argued that being moved by the belief that something is justified is a constitutive

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feature of a being of reason. There must accordingly be a connection between having the belief that something is justified and being moved in certain ways. If we judge that a certain belief is justified then, to the extent that we are beings of reason, we will be moved towards adopting that belief. If we judge that a certain course of action is justified then, to the extent that we are beings of reason, we will be moved towards adopting that course of action. Now, might it not be objected that there is an important difference between adopting a belief and adopting a course of action in that the latter, in contrast to the former, does not occur automatically? Obviously, there is a difference between them, but not a difference in kind. Instead, the difference lies in that in matters of action there is a significantly greater degree of inertia involved. It simply takes more to be moved the full distance when it comes to action. The step from the belief that p is a justified belief to the belief that p is a quantitatively lesser step than the step from the belief that φ is a justified course of action to doing φ. Were a being of reason to exist in a world completely free from inertia, to φ would flow just as automatically from the belief that φ is a justified course of action as the belief that p would flow from the belief that p is a justified belief. Yet, even in a world like ours, one of significant inertia in terms of action, the impulse is still there and that is all that is required. For persons governed by reason, to embrace the objects of their desires involves taking up positions in the space of reasons and the desirability characteristics of these objects are operative reasons that can be cited to rationalize their actions. Whether these operative reasons are good reasons is, of course, a matter for further discussion. In the previous chapter I discussed how we can understand values as socially constructed and if we adopt such a position we can naturally understand reasons as oriented around these social structures rather than around the subjective motivational sets of individuals. Nevertheless, while such a position does not imply the individualistic relativism of reasons that characterizes internalism, it would seem to imply a social relativism that from the perspective of the moral universalist will also be an unattractive position. The question, then, is this: are there not any reasons that are good reasons for agents simply because they are agents?

4.5 Brutes and Persons

While we can see actions as mere events and try to make them intelligible simply as such, we cannot take just any event and understand it as an action. Only those events that are actualized by certain kinds of beings can qualify as actions and, as Davidson and others have suggested, intentionality certainly seems to be an important feature in this context. However, as we have seen, the belief-desire

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model is not a satisfactory way of understanding human action since it fails to capture the role played by reasons. On the other hand, some non-human creatures might be cognitively and conatively advanced enough to be characterizable as capable of intentionality while it is clear that reasons have absolutely no role to play in their lives. This makes it fitting to distinguish between two different kinds of intentionality: (i) Brute intentionality: Characteristic of beings who are capable of purposive

behavior, but who have no sense of justification (ii) Reasoned intentionality: Characteristic of beings capable of purposive behavior

and who have a sense of justification, something which means that their beliefs and desires involve having taken stands in the space of reasons.

One way of understanding the difference between brutes and persons is of course that persons are beings that have what brutes have but then also a little extra added on top of it. When Derek Parfit opens his magnum opus with the line ‘Like my cat, I often simply do what I want to do’33 he is making a statement typical of this kind of stance, which, I suppose, is a very common stance to take. For instance, John Searle has wryly noted that ‘[o]ne way to describe the Classical Model [of rationality] is to say that it represents human rationality as a more complex version of ape rationality’.34 There is however another take on the matter, one that I would say that Kant is a representative of, but which one need not be a Kantian to adopt, namely that the difference between the person and the brute is such that it permeates even those features that the person and the brute might superficially be taken to have in common. The features essential to being a person are not merely a set of add-ons: they involve an altogether different mode of being. While both brutes and persons are characterized by having both conative and cognitive states with respect to the environment in which they are situated, this does not mean that these are identical states. It is clearly true that even a simple brute might be conceptualized as believing certain things, e.g. a cat might be said to believe that if it sits outside the door and meows it will be let inside, but this is a way of believing that is fundamentally different from when a person believes something. For a person to believe always involves taking up a position in the space of reasons, i.e. it is something which is inextricably bound up with justification. Of course, this does not mean that persons always think about

33 Reasons and Persons, p. ix. 34 Rationality in Action, p. 5.

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matters of justification when coming to believe things, but when they acquire new beliefs these are always integrated into a framework of other beliefs, many of which they have thought about in terms of what is justified. There is also a contestability about her beliefs: they are open to questioning, of being subjected, if perhaps not all at once, to the game of giving and taking reasons. The difference between brutes and persons does, thus, not lie so much in the moment of action but in the way in which one’s actions are integrated into one’s life as an agent. This means that the difference does not lie in some additional phenomenal quality, but rather in the underlying commitments that characterize the intentionality of persons. The agency of brutes can be understood fully in terms of the two states that the belief-desire model operates with, although it should perhaps be pointed out that a brute is also characterized by being incapable of second-order desires. This is perhaps not surprising since that capacity is often taken as an important characteristic of being a person.35 But on the account suggested here, this capacity for second-order desires must be understood in the right way if we are to get a good picture of what it means to be a person. (Generally speaking, the significance of second-order desires has been overestimated and the attention regularly given them is probably largely due to the tendency to think of desires as providing input into the process of practical reasoning. Those cases where we do have second-order desires usually have to do with failures of our first order-desires to track our reasoned judgments. One might for instance judge that there is good reason to work on a certain text but still find oneself quite unable to do so at times; in such cases our reasons are tracked by second-order desires instead of first-order ones.) The kind of normativity that we can sensibly speak of with respect to brutes is very weak. Normativity in a robust sense requires more: in the case of beliefs it requires the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality and not just the mechanical ability to adapt to ‘discoveries’ about what is the case; in the case of desires normativity in the robust sense can only be an issue in contexts where there exists the possibility of distinguishing between that which is desired and that which is desirable. Accordingly, while it is certainly true that we often, like Parfit’s cat, simply do what we want to do, it would not be accurate to take this as implying that we often act just like other animals. In order to prepare the ground for what will follow in the coming chapters I would now like to distinguish between three cognitive faculties characteristic of persons. The delineation of these faculties forms the core of a metaphysics of the person. Now, although Kant himself certainly has many things to say about

35 See Harry Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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the metaphysics of the person, he never presents a full-fledged theory of it and, although the theory presented here draws heavily on Kant, I make no claim about it being Kant’s theory: it is just a Kantian theory. I will go through these three faculties one by one, but it is important to realize that they do not operate in separation from each other. They form an organic system in the sense that if you were to remove one you would change the nature of the others. Thus, while Kant represents a faculty-oriented approach to the human mind, the faculties in question are not so much neat little units but rather interdependent abilities, or modes of operation, of the human mind as a whole. (i) Understanding. This is the ability to relate to the world in a conceptually informed way. The understanding is essentially tied to judgment in the sense that it is about deeming something as something. To a certain extent, other animals have something that might be called understanding as well and we can obviously say of them that they believe certain things in the sense that this allows us to make their behavior intelligible; but understanding in the full sense requires self-consciousness or more precisely the ability to understand that one can understand (or fail to understand). This being said, it should perhaps be pointed out that the faculty that Hume calls reason is mostly like the faculty a Kantian would call understanding, and it might also be conceded that since even brutes can be taken to be in possession of understanding in a rudimentary sense, the Humean theory of motivation is perhaps a fair model for making the behavior of other animals intelligible. As has been pointed out by many writers over the last few decades, most ethical thinking is not neatly separated into a cognitive part (that simply seeks to establish a description of the situation and the available alternatives) and one normative (that applies some code of rules to the description),36 especially since many of the concepts that we use in order to understand the situations that we face are normative and there is no reason to assume that one can be fully competent with these concepts without sharing in the evaluative outlook which they express. Many of these concepts serve as what Elizabeth Anscombe has called ‘stopping modals’,37 i.e. when we come to see a certain act as embodying the feature in question they tend to close down the viability of that act. For

36 For some prominent examples, see Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’ in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 37 ‘Rules, Rights and Promises’ and ‘On the Source of the Authority of the State’, Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. III: Ethics, Religion, and Politics.

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instance, I might contemplate a certain act and then come to understand it as being cruel and this understanding would, normally at least, be sufficient for ruling out the act in question. I will return to the question of the place that explicit thinking in terms of moral principles has in the life of a moral agent, but even if it turns out that it has a significant role to play, it is still quite clear that the vast amount of those parts of our thinking that are ethically informed are such that it has only to do with the understanding and that the understanding as a faculty involves both the factual and the normative. (ii) Imagination. When someone is stressing the importance of imagination with respect to ethical matters, it is usually a question of emphasizing the role played by imaginatively putting ourselves in other people’s shoes in order to better grasp the way that our actions affect them. This is surely an important aspect of moral deliberation, but the Kantian notion of ‘imagination’ [Einbildungskraft] is more fundamental than that. It is a constructive faculty that gives us the ability to think of something in its absence (although for Kant it is also a necessary perquisite for the experience of that which is present). For practical matters it is an ability of great significance. While self-awareness is often stressed as the key human trait in terms of which we must understand the central role of normativity in our lives,38 we should not underestimate the role played by imagination. Normative ethics is essentially about ideals. To think about how things ought to be clearly presupposes the ability to think of how things might otherwise be. Those philosophers and others who, like Plato or More, dreamed about utopias surely displayed it in abundance, but imagination is essential even on a smaller scale. When we reason about how to act, we do so from different sets of alternatives and the formulation of these alternatives requires imagination. And yet, the role of imagination is rarely even mentioned in works on practical deliberation, a fact that perhaps goes some way towards explaining why such philosophical accounts tend to present a picture of the agents as pushed rather than pulled towards acting as she does. (iii) Reason. Although the importance of the understanding and the imagination should not be underestimated, it is of course reason that is the central Kantian faculty, and given that we have rejected the Humean conception of reason it would seem that we should adopt a more substantial conception, one which understands reason as a faculty that assesses and weighs together reasons for and against believing and doing certain things. However, while this is fairly

38 Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, Chapter 1

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straightforward, it might still be wondered from where reason gets its material – these reasons that it deals in, where do they come from? With respect to practical reasoning, there was an obvious candidate for providing the material, namely that reasons are grounded in our desires, but this idea had to be rejected. It would therefore seem that we would need some form of externalist realism about reasons and, as suggested in the previous chapter, the only plausible theory that yields this is social constructivism. The reasons that we deal in are parts of the social heritage passed down to us from all those agents who have reasoned, behaved, believed, and desired within the bounds of the shared space of reasons that they have constituted together. However, as already pointed out, there is a problem with social constructivism in that it would seem to make what we have reason to do into a merely contingent matter; but while the concrete layout of the space of reasons within which we are situated might be determined by the social setting in which we lead our lives, this need not mean that everything about the space of reasons is purely a social construction. More precisely, it might be the case that certain features are necessary prerequisites for it to exist at all and that certain aspects of us as persons are actually necessary if we are to be able to constitute a space of reasons at all. To begin with, the practice of giving and taking reasons would certainly be undermined if the beings participating in it were not answerable to each other and as a minimal requirement of what it takes to be a person, there would seem to be the inherent disposition to see a need to meet reasons with reasons, i.e. if someone asks me for a reason that is always a pro tanto reason for presenting him with one. This feature of beings of reason is perhaps the key to the fact that morality has such a grip on us: our need to justify the way that we behave to the persons that we affect by our actions rests not so much on their bare ability to be affected as sentient beings, but on their ability to ask us why we act as we do. Generally speaking, this is something that has been neglected by Anglophone moral philosophers, usually since they have tended to neglect the sociality of human existence. The answerability of individual agents that is needed for the constitution of a space of reasons within which they can relate to each other under the idea of freedom would however seem to require a little more. To begin with, a commitment to basic rules of logic should be in place. Thus, to point out inconsistencies in the position of the other should precipitate a change in his position: an inconsistency should always be at least a pro tanto reason for change. Furthermore, something like a drive towards systematicity should also be in place. The reason is that if the game of giving and taking reasons is to be able to go on beyond the immediate things that can be said in favor or against some individual thing, the matters that we reason about and the things we support

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them with, must hang together. Of course, this game of giving and taking reasons does not presuppose that we all share a coherent whole, but it does presuppose that we tend towards this kind of coordination through systematization. There is an additional feature that is perhaps the most important one for Kant, namely the drive towards completeness and exhaustiveness, which means that reason seeks final ends and ultimate causes. Indeed, one of the main points of the first Critique is that, because of this, reason often makes us chase phantoms, drawing us into lines of thought that only lead to puzzles and paradoxes. This tendency is something that we should expect to find in a faculty that deals in what gives support to things since once this dimension of ‘why-questions’ is opened up there is always the question if the posing of why-questions can be brought to an end somewhere. There is, of course, no guarantee that reason will be satisfied in its search for final ends and ultimate causes (and other founding elements), but it should also be noted that there are many things that we find it obvious that one should believe in and things we find it evident that one should desire, even if we cannot present any further reasons for them. Such things play a constitutive role in the space of reasons in the sense that we need some firm ground on which we can stand while questioning other things. These things have a special status not in that they are immune to change, but in that changing them involves broad changes of outlook rather than mere piecemeal modifications. Aside from being in possession of these cognitive faculties, we humans are still beings that strive, beings of desire. One might of course say that desire constitutes the animal side of our nature, since unlike faculties like reason and imagination it is one that we share with the other animals. Does this mean that we are a sort of mixed creature – half brute, half person? To a certain extent we might say so, but then it is important to remember that in us these aspects are not distinct parts. Thus, when Kant points out that ‘if man gives free rein to his inclinations, he sinks lower than an animal because he then lives in a state of disorder which does not exist among animals’ (LE 122-23), what he is drawing our attention to is that we can never act just like the other animals and, again, the reason is that when human beings desire something it involves, at least according to this understanding of desire, taking a stand in the logical space of reasons. Not that it must involve a conscious taking of such a stance, but the fact that any object of a desire might be subjected to the tribunal of reason means that there is a principled dimension to the desires of a person. This is reflected in the Kantian talk about maxims. In doing a certain thing, given certain circumstances, a person that is governed by reason is committing herself to doing the same thing,

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given that she find herself in relevantly similar circumstances and given that she does not discover that there was some feature in the original circumstances the relevance of which she overlooked and that would have made a difference. The principled dimension in human choice does not mean that we cannot change our minds, but it does mean that we need some reason in order to change our minds. This commitment can be understood as me laying down a law for future situations and this is naturally an important precondition for the social construction of a space of reasons within which we can relate to each other. If there were no commitments of this kind, social life would be too haphazard for such construction to take place. By being in this way, I live up to a minimal form of accountability that is required for others to relate to me under the idea of freedom. This kind of freedom is also of a kind that makes it intelligible to speak of the person as being in possession of a will, in the Kantian sense of a faculty of principles, and it allows us to see how there is something to Kant’s idea about identifying the will with practical reason. It does, however, also mean that this entity called ‘the will’ is not given a phenomenologically prominent place; but then again, if we look at the moment of decision, it would be plainly false, at least in a phenomenological sense, to say that there is something like ‘the will’ in such a place. Indeed, it seems just as false to talk about the will as having such a place as it would be to speak of desires as having it. Yet, although I rarely think anything like ‘Now I decide to φ’ when choosing something, this does not mean that there is not an element of self-awareness present at the moment of decision. Indeed, what happens at the moment of willing seems to be an act of identification with an object of desire within a certain situational setting and the Kantian way of expressing this is that this act thus involves an implicit endorsement of a certain maxim. It is this act of identification that turns a maxim into a principle, and perhaps the simplest way to bring out the way in which even seemingly singular choices can involve principles, is to think about what would happen were we to face the same kind of situation another time. Given that we responded in a certain way before, and provided we have not learnt anything new that is applicable to situations of this kind, would we not see our response in the former situation as impinging on the new one? The drive towards consistency, inherent in a being governed by reason, would seem to demand it. There is certainly always the possibility that we are principled about not repeating ourselves, perhaps because we find it boring to act in the same way over and over again, but then we would still be acting on a principle. It might be objected that this kind of account still gives too prominent a place to reason in our lives as agents. After all, it would seem that we often act ‘for no reason at all’ and that this is something that we accept as quite natural. The

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position outlined here does however not suggest that we always think in terms of reasons or indeed that we in our back-pocket always have a set of positive reasons for doing what we do, reasons that we can produce instantly when asked to do so. Moreover, while we often do act in a spontaneous way it is quite clear that ‘acting for no reason at all’ is not a phenomenon that is always acceptable if people are to be able to relate to us as accountable individuals. Normally ‘acting for no reason at all’ is sound when it concerns matters that are of little importance, indeed acts where there is reason not to waste time by taking principled stands with respect to them. In other cases, it would involve a serious failure of reason. Which failures are serious and which are not? By and large this is something that depends on the socially constituted contents of the space of reasons (of course, it will also be a question of the normal functioning of human beings, although as such this has no normative relevance, it is just that if certain things are biologically hardwired into us we will tend to socially constitute norms that reflect these features). As a member of our community of reasoning, the person that makes no normative distinctions between certain things owes us an account of why he does not do so, an account that makes sense to us, or else we are justified in seeing his failure to do so as a failure of reason. That ‘he simply felt like it’ suffices in some cases, but not in all. In addition to this, it should be pointed out that even if our principles in some cases play no role in positively picking out certain actions, they can still be operative as limiting conditions on what we do (indeed, this is probably the way moral principles usually operate),39 i.e. they set certain bounds outlining a space within which we can act for no reason at all. What all this means is that there is a principled dimension in what kinds of acts are fitting to be done for ‘no reason at all’ and which are not.

4.6 The Dualism of Practical Reason

Given the above, there are both conservative and subversive elements involved in a community of reasoning: conservative, since we always already start from pre-existing structures in the space of reasons in which we are situated; subversive, since the right to question each other holds a critical potential capable of undermining many, if not all at once, of the distinctions that structure this space. Indeed, because of this inherent challengeability and the fact that it is

39 For an example of a contemporary Kantian who emphasizes this kind of role for moral principles, see Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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more difficult to put forward challenges than to answer them, one might perhaps even say that reason holds a directly destructive potential.40 But another, and perhaps more positive, light in which this can be seen is that there is an egalitarian tendency in reason,41 especially in the tendency to treat cases similarly, i.e. we need some reason for making a distinction about how to treat things rather than needing reasons not to make such a distinction. Thus, we should not be surprised to see this egalitarian tendency at work in philosophers that try to provide accounts of ethics that are in accordance with reason. For instance, in his The Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick presents three axioms, which according to him provide the basis for consequentialism:42 (1) Prudence: ‘a smaller present good is not to be preferred to a greater future

good (allowing for difference of certainty).’ (2) Justice: ‘if a kind of conduct that it is right (or wrong) for me is not right (or

wrong) for some one else, it must be on the ground of some difference between the two cases, other than the fact that I and he are different persons.’

(3) Rational Benevolence: ‘each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him.’

It is clear that all three of these axioms rest on appeals to the need of reason to find positive reasons for drawing normatively differentiating distinctions. And most reasonable people, when confronted with Sidgwick’s axioms, will probably feel sympathetic at least to the overall tendency of them (although, on closer examination, one might certainly find that there must be something wrong with them since they lead to conclusions that one cannot accept). One aspect that Sidgwick’s mentions, ‘the fact that I and he are different persons’ is certainly an operative reason in many deliberations and, thus, used to distinguish normatively between people and similar thoughts may be used to distinguish between different times in one’s own life; but if they are, they would seem to need

40 Cf. Bernard Williams’ worries about how reflection can destroy ethical knowledge, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), Chapter 9. 41 Although, of course, in the real world, asymmetries in power bring about that certain persons and groups are able to establish their challenges as ones to be taken seriously by everybody, whereas others are marginalized. However, even there, reason as such still holds a subversive and egalitarian potential. 42 The Method of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 379-382. To be precise, Sidgwick was discussing utilitarianism, the classic form of consequentialism. The latter notion was not even invented at the time he wrote, but in order to keep things simple I will still use it in connection with him as well.

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additional backing since it is not much of a reason merely to repeat the bare prerequisite of drawing the distinction in the first place. And as already pointed out ‘Because I felt like it’ is a response that runs counter to reason, at least when concerning things of importance, such as sacrificing a greater future good in favor of a smaller present. On the Humean story it is however wholly legitimate to do so. Or as Hume himself puts it:

[’Tis not] contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. A trivial good may, from certain circumstances, produce a desire superior to what arises from the greatest and most valuable enjoyment; nor is there any thing more extraordinary in this, than in mechanics to see one pound weight raise up a hundred by its advantage of its situation.43

But this is hardly the kind of agent that Sidgwick is worried about, for him the crucial step does not lie in making us accept (1), but rather (3), and his strategy is clearly to make us realize that since we already, in some form or other, accept (1) and (2), we should also accept (3). However (3) does not follow logically from (1) and (2); instead Sidgwick’s bet is that if we accept both (1) and (2) we will be prone to accept (3), but I suspect that (3) is also something that we might find independently appealing because of our inherent drive, as beings of reason, towards the systematic. It provides us with a beautifully simple way of relating due attention and human goods to each other. Sidgwick himself is certainly struck by this quality of utilitarianism: ‘If we are not to systematize human activities by taking Universal Happiness as their common end, on what other principles are we to systematize them?’44 Given the inherent tendency of reason towards systematization, this is certainly a question that the Kantian must take seriously. Now, there are at least two persons who will be unlikely candidates for accepting (3). The first is the true Humean agent; but this is a person who is in a sense not even part of the discussion. He rejects (1). He just happens to have certain desires and if he happens to think of certain means to satisfy them, it just might happen that he acts in accordance with those means. There is nothing normative about it. The second person is the ethical egoist, who accepts (1) and (2), but rejects (3). The failure to reach him is something Sidgwick himself acknowledges,45 but he is simply unable to find any arguments that would force such a person to become a universalist. However, since both of these character

43 Treatise, p. 416. 44 Ibid., p. 406. 45 Ibid., p. 499.

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types are perhaps rather the bogeymen of moral philosophy than actually existing character types this might not strike us as a serious problem. The main issue is instead with all us other people, who are initially drawn to both (1) and (2), and who have at least a vague idea about how the morals that we adhere to involve an important ideal of impartiality. But is that impartiality best captured through something like (3)? That is the real question. What the crucial step to (3) then hinges upon seems to be that we should come to see a parallel between the intra-personal and the inter-personal. Sidgwick suggests that in both cases what we have is a question of ‘considering the relation of the integrant parts to the whole and to each other’ and that in realizing that it is the same kind of procedure, we ‘obtain the self-evident principle that the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other’.46 What Sidgwick does here, by emphasizing this parallel, is to establish a duality of perspectives that one might take on one’s actions and, accordingly, he concludes that there exists a dualism of practical reason (although he laments the ‘pretentious sound of this phrase’47) in the sense that there are two distinct modes of reasoning about what to do, one prudential and one moral, and thus also two senses in which the question ‘what ought I to do?’ can be taken. As is well-known, Sidgwick thought his work a failure because he could not dismiss of ethical egoism as a reasonable way of life, but the question is if this is the important thing at stake here. What is probably more interesting is whether Sidgwick has characterized the moral in a reasonable way and on this matter it seems clearly to be the case that his way of setting up things does lead one to view utilitarianism as a natural counterpart to egoism. Accordingly, if we want to resist Sidgwick’s line of thought, there are two ways of doing it: either we reject the whole idea of a dualism of practical reason or we accept that there is this kind of dualism, but that his way of setting it up wrongly leads us to seeing utilitarianism as the natural theory to encapsulate the ideal of impartiality inherent in morality. The second option is the one that I will try to pursue, but that will have to wait until the final chapter. For now, I would like to say a few words about the first option, one that Sidgwick himself certainly saw as a distinct possibility:

[I]n the earlier age of ethical thought which Greek philosophy represents, men sometimes judged an act to be ‘good’ for the agent, even while recognizing that its consequences would be on the whole painful to him, as (e.g.) a heroic exchange of a life

46 Ibid., p. 382. 47 ‘Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies’ in Essays on Ethics and Method, ed. Marcus Singer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 43.

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full of happiness for a painful death at the call of duty. I attribute this partly to a confusion of thought between what it is reasonable for an individual to desire, when he considers his own existence alone, and what he must recognize as reasonably to be desired, when he takes the point of view of a larger whole: partly, again, to a faith deeply rooted in the moral consciousness of mankind, that there cannot be really and ultimately any conflict between the two kinds of reasonableness.48

For a modern reader, the way in which Aristotle and other Greek philosophers subordinate morality to the larger matter of the good life might certainly seem disturbing, but I do not think that the Greek approach can be brushed aside quite as easily as Sidgwick seems to think. It is not at all obvious that eudaimonism simply represents a lack of insight. To begin with, the dualistic picture urged by Sidgwick, and most other modern philosophers, drives a wedge between different modes of thinking in which the agent can involve herself, thus leaving the agent in a somewhat schizophrenic state. But not only is it a wedge, it is also a wedge that separates morality from the core being of the individual agent, something which might be seen as alienating us from morality and thus making morality into something that is inherently an enemy of our own pursuits. Now, this form of critique is highly pertinent for our purposes since Kantianism certainly is a dualistic theory and on the Kantian story morality does seem to become, virtually by definition, something that is associated with a burden, with having to go against one’s inclinations. Indeed, the very oughtness of human morality is identified by Kant as having to do with the fact that we are beings with inclinations; for a being with a holy will the moral law would not appear as an imperative at all. This aspect of Kantianism was criticized already by Hegel for alienating the concrete individual from her moral commitments. More recently, many writers within that contemporary field of ethical inquiry that might be loosely designated as ‘virtue ethical’ deplore the kind of split agent that tends to be a standard picture of much modern moral philosophy. The first to make this kind of charge was probably Elizabeth Anscombe,49 but writers like Michael Stocker,50 Bernard Williams,51 and Michael Slote52 have also put forward different variants in this family of objections. Of these, Williams is probably the one who has been most influential, especially in his argument that the fundamental question of ethics is the one Socrates puts in the Republic, namely about how one ought to live, and where this is understood as an inclusive

48 The Methods of Ethics, pp. 404-5. 49 ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. 50 ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976). 51 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Chapters 1 and 10. 52 From Morality to Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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question under which both moral and other aspects are to be weighed together as components of the good life. While Williams does not believe that one can produce some neat theory about wherein the human good lies the approach he favors is thus still an eudaimonist one. Nevertheless, even if Hegelians and virtue ethicists are right in drawing our attention to the way in which the Kantian picture (and Sidgwick’s as well) does precipitate a split in the agent, there does seem to be something to be said for the Kantian picture, at least in so far as it captures our common sense thinking of the matter better than Aristotelianism does. One might of course respond by saying something like ‘the worse for common sense’, arguing that it is still an unsound attitude which is given expression by the Kantian picture. But such an argument seems to presuppose a firm footing in something that lies outside of common sense, a ‘something’ that it is difficult to see exactly what it would be. Accordingly, there is one type of answer to the worry about ethical schizophrenia that is easy to make, but which might perhaps not do much to convince those who deplore our modern age, namely that we do, as a brute matter of fact, live in a culture where ideas about an inherent conflict between morality and self-interest are so deeply ingrained that there is simply no way back; we are stuck with these ideas and will be so for a long time – all that a moral theorist can do is to work from these ideas. This is not all that can be said in favor of the dualist model, although perhaps in the end the kind of appeals to our moral sentiments that can be made in favor of the dualist model do still fall back on the bare fact that we live in a culture in which this model is deeply ingrained. While a unification of one’s concerns might be an attractive ideal, the eudaimonist purchases this unity at the cost of homogenizing our concerns. Instead of the conflict between prudence and morality, eudaimonism gives us a conflict between a crude egoism and an enlightened one. Take for instance an action of helping another person. While it might be true that there is something disagreeable about portraying such an act as a burden, it is not at all clear that eudaimonism is a superior theory since while there is certainly something beautiful about the person who acts generously and benevolently and where this behavior flows naturally and effortlessly from her, the problem is that when people do not behave in such a way our criticism of them, if it is to be sound, would on the eudaimonist account amount to giving them cues about how to achieve more happiness. Take a classic example like the one used by Stocker, where a person visits a hospitalized friend out of duty, and where Stocker tries to convince us that theories like Kantianism are unable to account for the way that this kind of motivation is repugnant to us. However, imagine instead a person who has a hospitalized friend and who does not visit him. Suppose that someone

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said to him something like this: ‘Look, you have known Smith for twenty years now and he does not have many friends or relatives, surely you should visit him now that he is lying there all alone.’ – can the ‘should’ in this really be understood as anything but moral? Surely, it cannot be the same ‘should’ that one can find in a statement like this: ‘You should want to visit Smith because if you do not you are defective as a friend and then you are lacking one of the constituents of a good life’. Of course, the eudaimonist might respond that any other ‘should’ than of the latter kind is impotent, but to this it must be replied that it is better for it to be impotent than potent in that way. The split that is involved in the dualist model is actually rooted in the fact that the Other is a being distinct from me and those theories that seek to remove this split will also end up not taking seriously the ethical alterity of the Other.53 True, if we take such a thing as friendship, it might be correct that an overly moralistic way of thinking about one’s friendships might spoil them, but this does not mean that a distinct form of morality cannot be essential for sound friendships, ones where we do things for the sake of the Other in a deep sense and not just on the surface level of occurrent thought. We can conclude, then, that the dualist model is after all to be preferred, although it should perhaps be pointed out that Kant is not altogether as unqualifiedly dualistic as Sidgwick. Kant differs somewhat from Sidgwick in that while he certainly separates morality and happiness, he still integrates both of them in his vision of the highest good for the individual agent. In Sidgwick, the good for the agent simply consists in her happiness and that is the end of it. Is this enough for Kant’s theory to become unattractively eudaimonist? I do not think so since even if the moral is subsumed as a component of the highest good it is still clear that, within this compound, the distinction between the prudential and the moral is still operative and the prudential is subordinated to the moral. If

53 This problem is clearly visible in Aristotle’s theory of friendship, according to which the ideal friend ‘is related to his friend as he is to himself, since the friend is another himself’ (NE 1166a31-33), the idea being that if the other person is like oneself (and under ideal condition this means: is virtuous just like oneself), one can by analogy extend the love one feels for oneself to a love for the other, thus making the friend into something like a mirror in which I can admire the very qualities already possessed by myself. In the Aristotelian approach there is nothing like the sense of loyalty that grows from a shared personal history and it is difficult to see how one can make sense of that phenomenon without accepting that mutual obligations, albeit highly particular obligations grounded in concrete relations, have an important role to play in constituting real friendships. In fact, even when have drifted apart, perhaps by growing too dissimilar, we usually feel that we are to a certain extent bound to honor previous friendships in some respects, and this too is something the Aristotelian will have difficulties making sense of.

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we imagine a person who succeeds well with the prudential part of the highest good and is criticized for not being moral, this criticism cannot be framed in terms of a prudential ‘ought’ – in fact, the very notion of the highest good is one that makes sense only from a moral perspective. It is an encapsulation of the way that the moral person is to view his own pursuit of happiness, namely that the value of his happiness is conditioned on him also leading a morally acceptable life. On the Kantian story that is to be laid out in the next two chapters, prudence and morality represent two modes of systematizing our concerns and activities, one with respect to one’s own individual life and one with respect to the fact that we are a number of beings all trying to lead good lives within the context of a shared social space; the idea of the highest good then represents a way of systematizing these two strands into a whole.

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5. The Ideal of Happiness

There is, however, one end that can be presupposed as actual in all rational beings (so far as they are dependent beings to whom imperatives apply); and thus there is one purpose which they not only can have, but which we can assume with certainty that they all do have by natural necessity – the purpose, namely, of happiness. – Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 415

There is a family of concepts that all have to do with a similar subject matter, namely that of the human good: happiness, well-being, welfare, flourishing, and eudaimonia. While it is certainly possible to draw distinctions between these, I will not do so here. Instead, I will simply use ‘happiness’, much because this is the notion mainly used in the Kantian tradition. By itself this is perhaps not a conclusive ground for me to use it too, but when it just so happens that it is also the notion normally employed in everyday talk as well, it is difficult not to treat it as the default option. This being said, it should still be pointed out that in this case the choice of terminology is perhaps not as innocent as one might like. At least as we use it now, ‘happiness’ has a distinctly subjective slant and if one uses it in a philosophical investigation, will one not rig the discussion so that anything but a subjectivist type of theory will seem peculiar? Take ‘flourishing’ as a contrast – does it not have a much more objectivist ‘feel’ about it? This problem about terminology is one that I readily admit, but since I am going to attempt to formulate a subjectivist theory anyway, it does on the other hand seem appropriate to use a notion that has a strong subjective tone. Yet, since I do not want to commit myself to any specific theory already at this point, it is perhaps best to proceed from a somewhat loose characterization of happiness, namely that it has to do with what makes one’s life go well. If nothing else, this is a quite common view among philosophers today and, as such, it seems like a fair starting-point. In what follows, I will begin by reviewing some of the most commonly held positions on the question of what makes our lives go well. There are good reasons why all of them are to be deemed unsatisfactory and I therefore then turn to the explication of a Kantian alternative. After considering what kind of role such an approach allots to the notion of happiness, I end this chapter by

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discussing the question of why we should be moral given that morality is understood as something that can require of us that we sacrifice our own happiness.

5.1 Standard Positions and Standard Problems

Of course, the question of wherein happiness lies has been discussed by philosophers since antiquity. The fact that there has been such an overwhelming amount of writing on the matter creates a need for distinguishing between at least some main categories of theories about happiness. Ideally, such a categorization should proceed in accordance with some principle, thereby yielding a clear and exhaustive partitioning of the field, but as a simple matter of fact, there is no such commonly accepted categorization. Rather, the standard way of classifying theories about happiness is to distinguish between the following three theories: objective list theories, hedonism, and desire theories. As will become evident I am not really happy with this tripartioning, but before going into that, I will say a few words about the three standard contenders, briefly outlining them and indicating their main flaws. To a certain extent, the order in which I present them is quasi-historical and there is something of a dialectical movement within this order. (i) Objective List Theories. The idea here is simply that there is a plurality of things that make our lives go well, whether we want these things or not. For instance, at one place, Aristotle gives the following list of the constituent parts of happiness: ‘good birth, plenty of friends, good friends, wealth, good children, plenty of children, a happy old age, also such bodily excellences as health, beauty, strength, large stature, athletic powers, together with fame, honour, good luck, and excellence.’1 Other lists are of course possible; an example of a more modern one is the one presented by James Griffin: (a) accomplishment, (b) the components of human existence (which includes such things as autonomy of choice, working limbs and senses, freedom from great pain and anxiety, and political liberty), (c) understanding, (d) enjoyment, and (e) deep personal 1 Rhetoric, 1360b19-24. Since Aristotle provides this list in the Rhetoric rather than the Ethics it might be wondered whether he means it seriously as a list of the constituents of the good life or whether he is just listing the kind of things people generally think of as such. Yet even if the latter is the case, Aristotle’s general methodological bent when it comes to ethical matters should probably allow us to feel justified in using this passage to draw at least some rudimentary conclusions about the stuff that is supposed to go into that balanced compound he seems to envisage eudaimonia as consisting in (at least in his treatment of the matter in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics).

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relations.2 Perhaps Griffin’s list strikes us as more plausible than Aristotle’s, if nothing else it is formulated in a more systematic way; but what both of them do is still to provide us with lists of things that few of us would say no to. The problem is just that simply because something is fine in the sense that we would not say no to it, it need not be an integral part of what happiness consists in. Friends, health, and good luck might all be very nice, but the point is that it might seem as if the order of explanation has been reversed. Could it not be the case that the reason why such items belong on any reasonable list of important goods is that it so very hard to think of circumstances where people would not want them? But if a person does not, pace Aristotle, want to have children, nor, pace Griffin, care a whit about understanding, what are our grounds for saying that they should want these things and that having them would make them better off? It might therefore seem reasonable that some kind of endorsement constraint is put on the goods that are supposed to contribute to a person’s happiness: if a person does not in any way care about some alleged good, then the possession of that something cannot be anything that makes his life go well. If we take the above remark just as it stands, a hybrid version of the objective list theory might naturally suggest itself, namely one that presents us with a list of things that are capable of making our lives go well, but that only do so when they are endorsed by the person leading the life in question. Nevertheless, while such a hybrid version of objective list theory would clearly take care of a certain range of counter-examples, the two components of such a theory would sit rather uneasily together. If one really starts to take seriously our power to shape the list of things constitutive of our happiness, why not take it seriously in a positive way as well? If we are granted the power to render certain things non-constitutive of our happiness by not caring about them, why should we not be granted the power to make certain things constitutive of our happiness by caring for them? Before closing up this section about objective list theory, it is perhaps appropriate to say a few words about a tension between two kinds of approaches that are contained within it. The first consists of the simple list theories, which are simply attempts to narrow down the list of things that we intuitively find inherently important for the quality of our lives. Griffin is an example of this. The second approach consists of what might be called human nature theories, which start with an account of human nature and then deduce a list of goods from it. This will usually result in a perfectionist theory of happiness. Aristotle is an example of this, at least when it comes to essential goods like the activity of the rational part of the soul.

2 Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 67.

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On the whole, I would say that representatives of the first approach will have little to say with a straight face against those who complaint about how objective list theories do not take seriously what persons themselves feel about the matter of their own happiness. What these philosophers do is after all simply to take their own views about what makes lives go well, appeal to these views as grounded in ‘our’ intuitions, and then claim universality for them. If someone asks why some particular philosopher’s taste should be taken as authoritative, it is difficult to see what the response could be. The adherents of the second approach at least have something to say: since our nature is not up to us, why should we expect that the things that constitute our happiness are? However, they do also take on a rather difficult argumentative burden since such a theory seems to require a robustly teleological view of human nature. This is however a type of view that has little credibility today. Even if, as argued in Chapter 3, teleological models might have a certain use in understanding human action, it is difficult to see how such legitimate uses could be stretched to the point where they can ground an account of human happiness. (ii) Hedonism. This is the view that happiness consists in pleasure (or perhaps the excess of pleasure over pain, but I will keep things simple by just focusing on the positive component of happiness). It is a strikingly simple view and although I cannot claim to really know anything certain about the matter, I suspect that while objective list theories might capture much of the way in which we actually behave, i.e. we tend to pursue a host of goods, hedonism is a position that most people tend to entertain rather early on when they start to think philosophically about the nature of happiness. Unlike classical conceptions of happiness, where what we would call morality is often understood as a component of human flourishing and where, accordingly, we cannot flourish without being moral, hedonism is essentially an amoral conception of the human good. In fact, hedonism might even make it hard to see why we should be moral at all, since it construes what lies in our self-interest so very narrowly; and this kind of problem is even further aggravated if what one might call prudential hedonism is coupled with psychological hedonism (as was the case with Bentham and Mill).3 The main question for now is however whether hedonism is sound as a theory of what makes lives go well.

3 According to psychological hedonism, pleasure and pain are the only basic incentives for action. Thus, in order for me to do something there must be some promise of either pleasure achieved or pain avoided attached to this action. The problem with such a theory is, of course, that even moral behavior must be motivated in the same manner. Mill certainly saw this problem and since he did not let go of his psychological hedonism, he drew the conclusion that

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If the general problem with objective list theories is that they view happiness as essentially disconnected from what the individual feels about the matter, the problem with hedonism is that it severs the way my life is going from the way things are really going for me in the world. According to hedonism, it does not matter whether we fail or succeed in the world, as long as we feel pleasure. Now, of course, we all generally find displeasure in failure (and when we do find pleasure in it, it is usually because we have through this particular failure succeeded in some other sense); but, according to hedonism, as long as we think that we succeed, everything would be alright. Thus, a hedonist does not seem to have any resources with which to make sense of the way we tend to value an authentic over an inauthentic existence. This well-known example attempts to illustrate the problem:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? 4

If you were a hedonist, the answer would seem to be a resounding ‘yes’. Still, most of us would probably hesitate about submitting ourselves to this kind of existence. A problem with this particular example is however that perhaps our hesitation might very well partly be due to the fact that the scenario as such is so unbelievable. Nevertheless, even though our intuitive response might be somewhat tainted by such concerns, it is hardly exhausted by them. Leaving science fiction aside, there are certain phenomena in our world that might be considered as real-life experience machines. For instance, some states of religious belief can lend a subject a form of harmonious tranquility that makes him more or less immune to how he fares in the world.5 Yet, such tranquility might be bought at the cost of succumbing to a blind faith in religious authority. Say that one learns of a sect whose members all walk through life in a state of blissful stillness, but where the path to this blessed state is one best characterized as an especially thorough form of brain-washing; we can also assume that from the

if morality is to get a grip on us there must be sanctions, external or internal, maintaining it. The reason why Mill was reluctant to let go of his psychological hedonism was, of course, that his ‘proof’ of utilitarianism rested on it. 4 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 42. 5 This suggestion was made by Peter Sandøe in a talk he delivered at the Philosophical Society, Lund University, on September 25, 2000.

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point of view we presently occupy we can clearly see that the tenets which make up this religion are wholly unfounded, a confused hopscotch of ideas. Of course, once we become immersed in the sect, we would firmly believe in both the truth and the profound depth of these tenets. Would one, if offered membership in this sect, take the offer? I suppose that although perhaps some would, most would not. To some extent this can be explained by how we always already have different commitments that we would have to let go of in order to join the sect or which, at the very least, would as a simple matter of fact not be important to us after we have gone through the initiation procedure; thus, we would tend to decline an offer like this out of a sense of responsibility towards such pre-commitments. Yet, while that would certainly be part of the truth, I strongly suspect that even among those that have very few commitments, only a small number would accept the offer. The hedonist might perhaps say that this is simply a matter of prejudice, but the simple truth is that it is because we find that to lead a life based on a lie is to lead a life that is at least prima facie bad. Certainly, some of us would perhaps choose a fake fantasy over dreary reality, especially if reality became dreary beyond a certain level. Yet the essential point against hedonism is not that it would advocate such a choice, but rather that it makes us unable to say that in a choice between a real life and a virtual one in which we would accomplish the same things, the real one is superior. This flaw is all that it takes for hedonism to be false. However, it is not the only reason why we should reject it. Hedonism does have another drawback, one that is perhaps even more serious than the former. If pleasure is the one thing that constitutes happiness, then all other things that we regard as goods can only have an instrumental value. This point can be understood in two ways. The first is that of the so-called ‘paradox of hedonism’: the person who takes an instrumental attitude towards other things than pleasure will get less pleasure than the person who does not. Since the hedonist will not take the concrete objects of pursuit as seriously (after all, they are merely means to getting pleasure), they will not engage him in a way that can give real pleasure. Now, while I do regard this as a valid point in the sense that it is probably correct as an empirical generalization, I think that it is only a symptom of a much deeper failure. Still, in order to appreciate this, we might do well to look at how a sophisticated hedonist would respond to ‘the paradox of hedonism’. What should be noted is that this argument does not direct itself against hedonism as a theory of the human good, but rather against hedonism as a principle of living, i.e. when we put hedonism into practice, that practice will tend towards self-defeat. But, the sophisticated hedonist will say, that only means that the wise hedonist will not use hedonism as such a principle; at most, he will in some cool hour of reflection think somewhat about what

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constitutes happiness, but otherwise he will simply throw himself into the whirl of life taking his pleasure without thinking much about it. This kind of response brings us to the second version of the above complaint, namely that hedonism operates with an impoverished view of the nature of pleasure. It treats pleasure as something that we simply ‘feel’, but that misses one of the most significant forms of enjoyment that we have, namely what Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz has called life-satisfaction,6 that elated state of mind that we have when we have a sense of our life going well. This is a form of pleasure that involves judgments about the quality of one’s life. What this means is that an important part of what can make our lives pleasant rests not only on the fact that we have a variety of desires that we pursue, but that we have implicit conceptions of happiness according to which we can judge the way our lives are going. Of course, few of us will have a fully worked-out conception of happiness, but that is not necessary for us to make rough judgments about the way our lives are going – for that we need only rough conceptions of happiness. It is very hard to see how these conceptions could be thoroughly hedonistic and if they are not then it might certainly be asked what the relation is between them and the good of pleasure. The hedonist would have to say that these conceptions are useful fictions, but what is the ground for privileging pleasure over the goods already contained within the subject’s own implicit conception of happiness? Additionally, once we allow that a certain kind of pleasure, or enjoyment, involves a judgmental component, we might start wondering whether this is not the case with many other forms of pleasure as well. This would suggest that while hedonists have been right in identifying the centrality of pleasure, they have still gotten things backwards: rather than being the only thing that is good for us, pleasure is often a response to the things that are good for us.7 (iii) Desire Theories. Given the way hedonism is prone to yield peculiar results on matters involving how we really fare in the world, it is not strange that this next theory represents an attempted solution to such problems. The basic idea is that it is the fulfillment of our desires that makes our lives go well. Whether we speak about passions, inclinations, wants, preferences, or desires matters little – what is important is that what we have here is a kind of theory that involves both a subjective element, since our happiness depends on some kind of mental pro-attitudes, and an objective element, since the actual realization of our happiness depends on how things fare in the world.

6 Analysis of Happiness, trans. Edward Rothert & Danuta Zielińskn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), Chapter 1. 7 Cf. Elijah Millgram, Practical Induction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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The problem with the desire theory is just that we have such a vast variety of desires, especially since they must here be understood in the broad sense that includes mere wishes, so that if the theory is not restricted in some way there will simply be far too many things that can be conducive to my happiness. Since I do after all desire them it might very well be the case that I find it good if they are realized, but there is a significant difference between me finding something good and it contributing to making my life go well. One standard example is the following one:8 I meet a stranger on a train and she tells me about a terrible disease from which she suffers. Being gripped with sympathy for her plight, I consequently form a desire that she will some day be cured of her disease. I then continue with my life and one day, without me ever knowing it, the stranger is cured, which is of course fine (although it is rather the case that I desire it because it would be fine than that it is fine partially because I desire it), but does it make my life go any better? This form of objection seems fatal to the desire account, unless some way can be found to narrow down the kind of preferences that are allowed to count as being directly relevant for our happiness. One way of doing it is to say that only the satisfaction of internal preferences, i.e. preferences where oneself is in some way featured in the object of the preference, has prudential value. But while this certainly takes care of some cases, like the one about the woman on the train, it is difficult to see how it would take care of all cases where I get what I desire without there being any plausible way of construing it as an increase in my level of happiness. I might, for instance, have quite a lot of trivial preferences concerning myself, ones that are not instrumental since they are more like whims: it does not seem to be the case that the satisfaction of such desires merely makes my life go a little better, rather they have no relevance for the way my life is going. There is more. One of the advantages of desire theories is that they seem to be able to incorporate much of what is attractive about the other two theories. For instance, most of us clearly think that such things as friends are part of having a good life and given that we have such preferences, they will be. Most of us find pleasure very important and given that we do so the attaining of pleasure will count as satisfying an important desire. Yet, while the desire theory certainly allows prudential value to be intimately associated with such things as friendship, philosophy, and understanding, it is according to it actually not these things themselves that are the constituents of our happiness. While having friends will in a sense make me better off, it is actually the fact that my desire for having friends is fulfilled that has prudential value. But do I not desire having friends at least partly because I think that they make me better off? It would seem that the

8 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 494.

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desire theory gets things the wrong way around. In fact, according to it, the important thing is just that we have a manageable set of desires, not really which desires we have. For instance, from time to time we do think about branching out our interests, about trying new things. Given that the desire theory is correct the right measure for such choices would seem to be the expected amount of desire fulfillment – and that does not fit especially well with the way that we reason in such circumstances. And even if we do not think about adding more desires to the ones we already have, the desire theory implies that one way of becoming better off would be simply to adopt some preferences that are easily satisfied. The conclusion, then, is that while the desire theory might, at first sight, seem like a promising alternative to the two preceding approaches, it suffers from flaws serious enough to warrant its dismissal. Having said this much, I might however add that the position that I will finally advocate here probably lies closer to desire theory than to any of the other two. Before I turn to my attempt at formulating a Kantian account of happiness, I would however like to say a few words about some problems shared by all three of the standard contenders. To understand these problems will hopefully help us in constructing a more satisfactory account of happiness.

5.2 Happiness: Subjectivism vs. Objectivism

Although the three standard positions outlined and criticized in section 5.1 are often referred to as theories, one might certainly question whether they are really appropriately understood as such. The reason is that, with the possible exception of human nature theories, they cannot be said to approach the matter of happiness in any greater depth: they simply try to name some items. Perhaps one might be tempted at first glance to think that at least the second and third alternatives are theories in some more substantial sense than the first one, but this would be a mistake, albeit one that it is perhaps easy to fall prey to. The real difference is that the last two are monist positions and the first a pluralist one. The mere fact that something is a form of monism does not make it more of a theory, it just means that we have a shorter list. It therefore seems doubtful whether the label ‘theory’ should be applied to any of these three. We should demand something more than a bare list of goods, even if it is a list containing just one good, in order for something to count as a theory. Rather, these three positions are conceptions of the human good. What a theory about happiness should do is something more: it should make sense of what it is about being a person that constitutes there being such a thing as one’s life going well (or bad, depending on how things turn out).

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The key stand to be taken here is between subjectivism and objectivism. This is a point that has recently been made by L. W. Sumner whose view of this distinction is that ‘a theory treats welfare [i.e. what I call “happiness”] as subjective if it makes it depend, at least in part, on some (actual or hypothetical) attitude on the part of the welfare subject.’9 This kind of view does however cast the net somewhat too wide since there are at least two important senses in which happiness can be subjective according to it.10 The first is that those things which constitute happiness, what might perhaps be called happy-making features, are subjective in the sense that they are things which involve mental states. Both pleasure and desire satisfaction are subjective in this sense (although desire satisfaction per se is not a mental state, it is still something that essentially involves a mental state). This would mean that objective list theories are the only objectivist theories (they might certainly have some mental states on their menus, but that is not enough for them to qualify even as partly subjective since as long as they have a single item that is not connected to a mental state, they deny that there is an inherent connection between happiness and the subjective). The second way in which happiness can be understood to be subjective is considerably stronger. According to it all three of the ‘theories’ of happiness considered above are objectivist positions since they are all attempts to settle the issue of which items constitute happiness for all subjects, irrespective of what the subjects themselves think about the matter. Is this classification of them as philosophical cousins far-fetched? It is certainly clear that when one glances at these three varieties one might be tempted to say that the first one is an objectivist theory and the other two are subjectivist ones, and it might thus seem counter-intuitive to claim that they are nevertheless objectivist theories all three of them. But in fact, I would say that it is this second sense of subjectivism that is the important one: true subjectivism about happiness leaves it up to the individual subject to say what constitutes her happiness. If subjectivism in this second, and more radical, sense is correct then the extent to which the philosopher can say anything substantive about what makes us happy is drastically lessened; what we can do is just to attempt to identify the formal features of the way in which an individual’s happiness is defined: the exact content will involve a vast amount of contingent facts about that person, facts about which the philosopher has precious little to say except perhaps as an armchair psychologist. Now, if we take this second sense of ‘subjectivism’ as the important one, the characterization of objective list theory given above is

9 Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 38. 10 In distinguishing between these two I have benefited much from Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, ‘L. W. Sumner’s Account of Welfare’, forthcoming in the Proceedings of the III SEFA Congress.

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somewhat misleading since the ‘whether we want these things or not’-clause is just as applicable to hedonism and desire fulfillment theory. Granted, it is more difficult to conceive of situations where we do not want pleasure or having our desires fulfilled – in fact, it is impossible to imagine a human being that does not generally want these things. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to think of cases where we do not want some particular instance of pleasure or to have some particular desire fulfilled, and that is enough to establish the point being made here. It is also quite clear that we might desire certain things that by themselves do not involve mental states and which can be said to make us happy. If we try to base, say, hedonism in the fact that we all desire pleasure in a way that grounds its status as a happy-making feature (which would leave us with a theory that is subjective in both of the above senses), we must also show that there are no other things that we can desire in this way; otherwise hedonism cannot be a correct understanding of where happiness lies. These observations open a possibility for desire theorists to modify their account of happiness by re-conceiving the relation between desires and prudential value. Instead of saying that what has value is the satisfaction of our desires, we can say that what has value is the objects of our desires.11 Thus, if I desire pleasure, then it is pleasure that is valuable, not the satisfaction of my desire for pleasure. If I desire having friends, then my friends are what is of value, not the satisfaction of my desire for them. I find this approach phenomenologically more satisfying. However, it should be noticed that this move changes the desire theory in a radical way, from a substantial theory about which things actually have prudential value, to a formal one about how prudential values are constituted. It should also be pointed out that while desires could generally be understood as playing a necessary role in the constitution of values simpliciter (although as argued in Chapter 3 they do probably not play such a role in any straightforward way), what we are concerned with here is a specific form of value, namely that which makes up our happiness. For instance, I and many others might desire that Venice be saved from being consumed by the sea. Let us assume that for most of us this is just an idle desire, we do not make saving Venice into one of our life projects. It does not seem unreasonable to say that the fact that we are many people who desire that Venice be saved in some way adds to making the saving of Venice into a good thing. Even if one were some kind of objectivist who regards the saving of Venice as valuable irrespective of what anyone thinks about the matter, one would still probably say that if many people desire the saving of Venice, it would add to the value of

11 In a more general way, this kind of move is advocated by Wlodek Rabinowicz in ‘Value Based on Preferences: On Two Interpretations of Preference Utilitarianism’.

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accomplishing this. However, if Venice were indeed saved, it would hardly be appropriate to say that we were made happier because of it. Of course, we might take pleasure in the fact that Venice was saved and this pleasure should probably be counted as adding to our happiness, but the bare fact of Venice being saved does not seem to make our lives go better. Had it been one’s life project, things might have been different since there is a quite reasonable sense in which one’s life goes well when one succeeds in one’s life projects; but then the prudential value that can lie in saving Venice does not have to do with the actual object of one’s life-project, but with the fact that it is a life-project that has been realized (even if the value of saving Venice was the rationale for having that specific life-project). Accordingly, it would seem that many of the things that we feel can be connected to prudential value are such that the inclusion into our lives of these things by themselves will not make our lives go better – and thus the move to an object interpretation of the desire theory would not seem to be a general solution to the problems faced by the desire theory. While one might certainly grant that there are a few obvious constraints that might be put on desires that can be said to constitute happiness-making-ness in their objects, there is still something disorderly about the way that a person’s happiness is constituted according to this theory. The alternative desire theory shares with the original one the implication that when considering a certain course of action where an individual’s own personal happiness is at stake the correct procedure, irrespective of the manner in which she might actually deliberate, is a form of intra-personal democracy. This means that while the alternative desire theory is subjectivist in a much more radical way than either hedonism or the original desire theory, there is still a sense in which they are all three not as radically subjectivist as can be. They are subjectivist at a micro-level, in the sense that the buildings-blocks of happiness that they identify are tied to subjective states, but they are objectivist at a macro-level, in the sense that when it comes to overall judgments about people’s happiness, the subjects themselves do not have any kind of prerogative in determining this. They can perhaps be granted a certain degree of epistemic privilege in the sense that the subject might often be highly qualified in judging matters of fact having to do with her happiness; but as for normative overall judgments about the way her life is going, she has no privileged say at all. In fact, although different versions of these theories might give widely divergent answers as to which lives are worth living and which are not, they share the structural feature that it is possible that we as outside observers might come to a different conclusion than the person who lives the life in question and that we can be right in doing so. Of course, this does not automatically yield the result that we sometimes should kill persons for their own sake in spite of the

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fact that they themselves find their lives worth living. Nevertheless, is does open up this result as a live possibility when we move on to further inquiry into the nature of morality. If we adopt a consequentialist morality this kind of take on happiness might quite possibly yield the result that in certain circumstances we will be under an obligation to kill people despite of the fact that they themselves find their lives worth living. Not only do I find that such a result would be completely unacceptable, it is actually so repugnant that there is reason to think that there must be something wrong not just with a theory that actually gives us this result but also with one that opens up for it, i.e. there must be something wrong with theories of happiness that do not in some sense give the individual a stronger authority in matters concerning her happiness than what is the case with the theories we have considered so far. While such potential implications are disturbing, the basic problem here is more fundamental than having to do with some possible consequences in the theoretical long run: it has to do with the relation between the agent and her interests. Even if we understand ‘interests’ broadly so that it can include both subjective items like pleasure and desire fulfillment and objective items like health and friendships, these theories tend to reduce the agent to a simple executive that is to do her best to pursue a heap of interests – or to put it starkly: these theories conceive of the individual as the slave of her interests, rather than as their master. This is actually a feature shared by all those approaches to happiness that are directed towards listing items on a micro-level and it is an aspect of standard philosophical theories about happiness that does not accord well with the, albeit limited, freedom that we usually associate with global judgments concerning how our lives are going. It is, to a certain extent, up to us to say how well our lives are going. The reason why I add these caveats, ‘albeit limited’ and ‘to a certain extent’ is that when we judge about matters like these we have to draw on the evaluative resources available to us. As already argued, we occupy a socially constituted space of reasons and values and the concrete ways in which this space is shaped certainly constrains us in our capacity for making intelligible value judgments. Even if there is a certain freedom of judgment when it comes to determining our happiness, this is still a freedom that is firmly anchored in our concrete circumstances. Thus, it is quite reasonable to say that certain judgments made by an individual simply do not make sense and I do not want to say that there is any absolute agent prerogative in the sense that whatever the agent says about her own happiness is the final word; rather I would like to put it like this: there cannot be any final word without the agent having had her say in a reasoned way. The latter is what adherents of the standard theories must deny. What we need is a theory that allows the global judgments of the agent to play a constitutive role in matters of her happiness.

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To some extent the approach advocated here is an anti-theory of happiness and it is perhaps more often embraced within political philosophy where it can be used as a premise in arguing for a liberal society (since there is no single objectively valid conception of happiness, the government should not have the happiness of its subjects as its aim, but rather to uphold a framework within which each subject can pursue her happiness as she understands it). Some might perhaps see the desire theory as fitting this kind of liberal model (and of the theories considered above it is certainly the one most fully in line with the liberal position), but while it leaves the subject a certain freedom to decide the contents of her happiness, in the sense that it leaves her the freedom to desire different things, it does not really leave her the freedom to decide her happiness in a reasoned way that directly concerns precisely her happiness and not just specific items of desire. Thus, it disregards the difference made by the subject’s own judgments about her happiness. It can certainly take them into account insofar as they too constitute desires, but they would still simply be some desires among many others and there is nothing in the desire theory that makes it reasonable to say why these judgments (or as the desire theorist would put it: second-order desires) should have more than one vote each in the assembly of desires.12 While democracy might be a sound system on an inter-personal level, one in which the wants of many subjects are aggregated, it is hardly suitable for the intra-personal case. As John MacKenzie has put it, ‘what we really seek to satisfy is not our desires but ourselves.’13 We are not simply the executives of the assembly of desires, as subjects we are something above and beyond our desires – not that our desires are not pivotally important in defining who we are, but they do not define us in the sense that we are but the sum of our desires. We might for instance have some desires with which we do not at all identify and what such acts of non-identification, and perhaps even of disassociation, imply is not just that the desires in question will tend to be outvoted by our other desires, but that when it comes to normatively guided choice, they do not have any vote at all. What this means is that what a bona fide subjectivist approach to happiness will do is to place a strong emphasis not just on the subject’s desires, but on her conception of happiness, i.e. the standard according to which she judges whether her life is going well or bad and to which extent it is doing so. None of the standard theories in the contemporary philosophical literature is subjectivist in this sense, although there are individual theoreticians who are. L. W. Sumner’s position is an example of a theory that is subjectivist in this way, although it is a

12 Cf. Gary Watson’s well-known criticism of Frankfurt’s emphasis on second-order desires, ‘Free Agency’ in Gary Watson (ed.), Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 13 A Manual of Ethics, 4th Ed. (London: W. B. Clive, 1904), p. 231.

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more complex view since it involves both a notion of happiness and a notion of welfare, happiness being understood as life-satisfaction and welfare as authentic, i.e. informed and autonomous, happiness.14 It is however a theory that makes happiness (or what Sumner would call ‘welfare’ since this is the more inclusive notion in his theory) too much of a felt quality. Of course, life-satisfaction is certainly not just a matter of what we feel since it is something that inherently involves judgment, but even so there is something too ephemeral about happiness in this sense. After all, when we judge that we are happy would we not want to say that we can actually discover, when thinking about the matter, just how good our lives are: it can strike us as an insight. Yet, on Sumner’s theory, it is the judgment that our lives are going well that constitutes our happiness and this would seem to amount to putting the cart before the horse. Since none of the theories considered this far has proven to be satisfactory, we are clearly in need of some additional candidates and I will now turn to consider if such a theory can be constructed from the writings of Kant.

5.3 Towards a Kantian Account of Happiness

At least two things are clear when it comes to Kant’s writings on happiness: the first is that ‘happiness’ is a notion he uses frequently, the second that he nowhere presents a comprehensive theory of happiness. Accordingly, ‘happiness’ is characterized, in a sense, by both its omnipresence and its virtual absence in Kant. This is much due to something that must be constantly kept in mind when considering Kant on happiness, namely that when he writes about happiness his purpose is generally negative, or as Thomas E. Hill, Jr. puts it: ‘[m]uch of his work in ethics in fact seems devoted to putting happiness in its place.’15 Since he wants to paint a picture of morality that does not have happiness as a keystone, his main objective when writing about happiness is simply to portray it as a bewildering mess of contingencies. In doing so he does however tend to neglect a distinction that he otherwise takes very seriously, namely the one between form and content. Even if there is messiness with respect to the contents of happiness, there might be interesting things to say about the formal features of happiness. These might not be enough to ground a complete system of ethics, but they still deserve to be investigated if we want to achieve a fuller understanding of the ethical domain as a whole.

14 Ibid., Chapter 6. 15 ‘Happiness and Human Flourishing in Kant’s Ethics’ in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds.), Human Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 148.

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If we consider such formal aspects, it is clear that Kant is some kind of subjectivist about happiness and despite the unsystematic nature of his work on the matter, there are a number of themes that recur in his writings; and although it is quite hopeless to try to identify something like ‘Kant’s theory of happiness’, there is still enough of a thematic coherence for constructing a Kantian theory of happiness by drawing on material from Kant. This is what I will attempt to do here and there are four themes that should be especially emphasized: (i) Happiness is connected to our desires. We are beings of desire and it is quite clear that there are many passages in Kant that suggest that he is simply a fairly indiscriminate desire theorist about happiness; he says, for instance, that ‘happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires’ (CPR A806/B834) or that ‘in this Idea of happiness all inclinations are combined into a sum total’ (G 399). Then again, Kant does have a tendency, especially in his early Critical writings to take a view on the relation between desire and reason as simply standing in opposition to each other, a kind of view that should be rejected. As pointed out in the preceding chapter, the fact that we are also beings of reason does not so much mean that we can go against our desires (although it does mean that we might at times go against certain unmotivated desires), but that in general our desires are, if not determined by reason, then at least situated in the logical space of reasons. Now, it has often been noted that as reflexive beings we might contemplate our desires and we might even form second-order desires, i.e. desires about desires (and, of course, one could also imagine cases where we come to form third-order desires, i.e. desires concerning our second-order desire, and so on). Generally, the relevance of this phenomenon has been both overestimated and misunderstood by philosophers. Overestimated, because we rarely think in terms of what we desire but in terms of desirable objects, objects the pursuit of which there might be reasons for and against. Misunderstood, because while higher-order desires certainly presuppose reflexivity, they are normally based in the seeing of reasons for or against some striving that we cannot help having.16

16 Things might however at times be more complex than this. Take for instance sexual desire. People normally have first-order sexual desires, and although these are probably not thoroughly reasoned, they are usually still responsive to certain types of features and thus not altogether without a principled dimension. Towards these desires they might then have second-order desires, such as shame, which might be residues of their upbringing and not anything that is supported by reasons that these persons accept. In such cases, the higher level does not stand for a more reasoned approach. However, I would suggest that the normal thing in such cases would be to have third-order desires against these second-order desires, i.e. such persons wish to be rid of their sense of shame on account of there being no rational ground for it. This example thus suggests that while higher-order desires need not be more reasoned than their

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That we are beings of reason does however mean more than that our desires are situated in the logical space of reasons. As such beings we strive towards imposing order on what is disordered and surely one such area where there is never any complete order is our desires. Even if we are beings of reason, the complexities of our lives far outrun our cognitive capacities and even if our desires are normally reasoned it is just naïve to believe that our desires could ever be perfectly ordered.17 Accordingly, seen purely from the standpoint of reason, our desires might seem a nuisance and one might perhaps even sometimes think that things would be better were one to be relieved of them altogether. Kant certainly gives voice to such thoughts: ‘Inclinations themselves, as sources of needs, are so far from having an absolute value to make them desirable for their own sake that it must rather be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them’ (G 428). This is, of course, rather harshly put. Even if our desires, the whole sprawling and incalculable immensity of them, make our lives difficult, they do also form the material without which we would find little point in living – or perhaps even: without which the question about a point in living would not even be meaningful. Life without desires would equal death. Even if such a form of existence would be possible it would be so far removed from us that our concept of life would not be applicable to it; and where we, by some miraculous occurrence to change into such a form of existence there would be so much lost that one would have to say that we had died. It is simply a fact of life that living is about striving towards things. But what about the striving of reason to systematize? There are clearly some materials here to work with. We have a fairly good conception of what is involved in leading a human life and the very fact that we ask ourselves so effortlessly wherein happiness consists shows that this conception is one which

lower counterparts, we might still expect highest-order desires to be such that they track the reasons that we see regarding the matter in question. 17 It might be objected that we must distinguish between our desires not being fully ordered and us not knowing exactly how they are ordered. Even if the immensity of a human being’s mass of desires is such that we will in actuality never know how they are ordered, this does not preclude there being such an order that we would under ideal circumstances be able to find out. But while there certainly is this kind of distinction to be made, it is surely not an interesting one: our desires are indeterminate in the sense that we rarely have clear-cut conceptions of what we want and how much we want it – at times we are forced by circumstances to make things more clear, but in such cases there is always an element of invention, not just mere discovery. Thus, even if we were able to take a time-out from our lives and be transported to another universe where we could spend the better part of an eternity answering questions about a variety of lotteries, such a procedure would not lay bare an order of desires that was already there, rather it would partially construct such an order and thus make us into different persons than we were before.

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lends itself well to be understood in terms of degrees of success. Likewise, the fact that philosophers come up with answers to the question, albeit not quite as effortlessly as the question is put, shows that we do have the ability to formulate systematic conceptions of happiness. Now, the candidates considered above are thought to be valid for all human beings, but reason is in fact faced with a much more pressing task than formulating a solution to a common human problem; my faculty of reason is faced with the facts of my life, my wishes, my hopes, my longings. I cannot but live, and faced with this fact, reason cannot but be impelled towards systematizing these matters; and the form that this drive takes is as a drive towards a conception of happiness. As already pointed out, our desires are not be understood as blind forces of nature; rather, on the view adopted here, the objects of our desires are under normal conditions located in the logical space of reasons, they are things about which one can speak meaningfully for or against and they can be put in relation to other such objects. Yet, this does not mean that I automatically have a perfect and reasoned picture of what would constitute success in living. The fact that the space of reasons is socially constituted through an immense number of processes ensures that it is never ordered in a perfect fashion and that it is constantly evolving; while there are some things that stand firm given the way that we are positioned now, few if any things are for ever in this kind of space. What this does however also mean is that, depending on the concrete space of reasons in which I partake, there will be certain default goods that are obvious building blocks of a good life. If I am in touch with the space of reasons in which I am partaking, then these are goods that I will desire, that I will strive towards realizing in my life. What objective list theorists tend to do is simply to list some of these default goods and if they list different goods then that is probably just because they are situated differently. That they are often so assured in what they are doing is nothing to be surprised at since default goods are characterized precisely by the way that they seem so obviously good. The fault that unites all objective list theorists is simply that they do not see what they are doing. The default goods provide a starting material around which one can formulate a conception of happiness. Depending on the circumstances under which we live there are then a number of different things that can make sense as filling out the blanks left by their dominant presence. In fitting things together, in seeing how certain things make sense in the context of our lives, we are engaged in activities of reasoning. However, while reason has this role to play, it should be pointed out that it is still restricted by the resources of the concrete space of reasons in which one, as an individual agent, is situated. In many questions there are simply no answers to be found, since for those answers to exist they would have to be socially constituted; and yet we have to live our lives now – we cannot wait for

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an endless discourse coming to a close. Thus, reason alone cannot formulate a conception of happiness that is a sufficient response to the needs that I as a concrete individual have of getting a navigational bearing in my life. (ii) Happiness is an ideal of the imagination (G 418). For Kant there is an important distinction between something being an ideal of the imagination and being an ideal of reason. An ideal of the imagination is something that rests purely on empirical grounds and happiness is such an ideal. That all the elements which belong to a conception of happiness are without exception empirical has the consequence that ‘although every man wants to attain happiness, he can never say definitely and in unison with himself what it really is that he wants and wills’ (G 418). I have of course just stressed the way that our conceptions of happiness are reasoned; does not this clash with Kant’s own views? There is certainly a tension here, but Kant too sees how our conceptions of happiness are not mere sacks of desires and that there is an important constructivist element at work here. In fact, for him, this constructivist element is an important reason why happiness is so ill-fitting to provide the cornerstone for an ethical theory:

The conception of happiness is not one which man abstracts more or less from his instincts and so derives from his animal nature. It is, on the contrary, a mere idea of a state, and one to which he seeks to make his actual state of being adequate under purely empirical conditions – an impossible task. He projects this idea himself, and, thanks to his understanding and its complicated relations with imagination and sense, projects it in such different ways, and even alters his conception so often, that were nature a complete slave to his elective will, it would nevertheless be utterly unable to adopt any definite, universal and fixed law by which to accommodate itself to this fluctuating conception and so bring itself into accord with the end that each individual arbitrarily sets before himself. (CJ 430)

If we look past the somewhat pessimistic tone of this passage, it should be quite clear that Kant’s position is a strongly subjectivist one; his subjectivism is so stark that one might wonder whether, if our conceptions of happiness are such whims of the imagination, they deserve to be taken seriously at all. In fact, does not a Kantian position come close to the kind of vulgar subjectivism that simply says that whatever the subject herself thinks is the contents of her happiness, that is what constitutes her happiness? Yes and no. There are no universal and yet substantive constraints on just what might be part of a person’s conception of happiness, but this does not mean that the concrete individual is completely free. That happiness is an ideal of the imagination does not for any concrete individual mean that it can be just about anything. One’s imagination might of course sometimes run wild, and there might also be differences between

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different persons as to how far their imaginative reach goes, but there is a difference between something being a vision of the imagination and something being an ideal of the imagination. While the former is something that can be a mere fancy, the latter is something that is operative within our practical thinking, it is something that provides us with a compass in our lives and, above all, this means that we must be able to take it seriously; if we are integrated into a concrete space of reasons, this is something that is constrained by the default goods recognized by those partaking in that space of reasons. Thus, when I argued earlier that there are always gaps that cannot be filled by reason alone, what we should see is that it is up to our imagination to fill these gaps, but also that in so doing our imagination is still constrained by those things that can clearly be recognized by our reason. For instance, many of the default goods are such that they can be had in different quantities and at different times in our lives; while there are many established protocols for how to (roughly) balance these things, there is still significant room for the play of imagination in deciding exactly how to do it. When Kant says that our conceptions of happiness fluctuate over time, we should remember that these fluctuations rarely concern the default goods, but have to do rather with how we perpetually tend to invent new ways of weaving these goods together. What kinds of things, then, might be included in a conception of happiness? Clearly, they are things that we must be able to come to possess in some sense of the word, although obviously it cannot, at least not primarily, be in the physical sense of possession, i.e. the sense in which we might possess material objects. Since the notion of ‘life’ is of central importance here, another option does naturally suggest itself: one mode of possession is to stand in a relation to something so that it is incorporated into one’s life, it becomes part of the narrative structure and flow of one’s life. Thus, the things that can be included in one’s conception of happiness are such they have the capacity to become parts of one’s life in this sense. Finally, it must be made clear that even with the combined efforts of reason and imagination, the conceptions of happiness that we live by are still vague; but as Aristotle puts it in his well-known methodological remark: ‘the educated person seeks exactness in each area to the extent that the nature of the subject allows’18 – since the materials we have to work with in formulating conceptions of happiness are vague, the end result cannot be expected to be anything but vague. A person with an incredibly precise conception of happiness would not be an exceptionally wise person, but a lunatic.

18 NE 1094b24-25.

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(iii) Happiness is something we necessarily pursue. We have now seen that according to the Kantian picture of happiness, it is something very indeterminate. Yet, fuzzy as this kind of ideal of the imagination might be, it is still in abstracto something that we necessarily want. This is something that Kant himself repeats over and over again (and one of those formulations stands as the motto for this chapter). At times he just seems to take it as a brute empirical fact that this is simply the way we do behave, but it would be wrong to assume that this is all there is to it. As Thomas Nagel has so aptly put it when discussing prudence: ‘We do not merely like the idea of our own future happiness.’19 There is of course a simple way of accounting for this phenomenon: since our happiness necessarily has to do with things that we want, we want our happiness as a whole on account of it consisting of individual things that we want. Yet, does this really capture the way that we care about happiness? No, and the reason is that this kind of view does not make sense of the way in which happiness figures as an ideal in our lives. An alternative suggestion would be that it is precisely on account of the fact that the ideal of happiness stands as something that gives us a navigational bearing in our lives, as something that orders and partially systematizes our strivings, that we as beings of reason necessarily embrace it. As such a being it would be absurd to say of happiness that it is merely something that it would be fun to have, it is something without which we could not find our way through life and it cannot be this kind of guiding light without us necessarily pursuing it. (iv) Happiness involves enjoyment. As already pointed out, for Kant the most important feature about happiness is its lack of philosophical substance, that it is not fit to build an ethical theory on. Sometimes this lack of substance is expressed in terms of how happiness is a matter of unwieldy desires; sometimes in how it has to do with whims of the imagination, and sometimes in how it involves the fickle state of pleasure, e.g. when he speaks of happiness as ‘the greatest aggregate of the pleasures of life, taking duration as well as number into account’ (CJ 208). Now, while one can at times perhaps think of Kant as a hedonist, at least he sounds like one at times, I do not think that would really be fair since his views are such that he integrates pleasure with desire and judgment in a way that makes it hard to label him as a hedonist (whether in the prudential or psychological sense):

Life is the faculty of a being by which it acts according to the laws of the faculty of desire. The faculty of desire is the faculty such a being has of causing, through its ideas, the reality

19 The Possibility of Altruism, p. 45.

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of the objects of these ideas. Pleasure is the idea of the agreement of an object or an action with the subjective conditions of life, i.e., with the faculty through which an idea causes the reality of its object (or the direction of the energies of a subject to such an action as will produce the object). (CPrR 9n)

As is it stands, this is surely a somewhat too intellectual picture of pleasure; but this passage still shows how Kant is not alien to the idea that pleasure can go together with making judgments, more precisely the judgment that a desire has been fulfilled. Since one’s conception of happiness is an object that we strive to realize, and which can be at least partially realized, there should be room in the Kantian picture for a form of pleasure that is similar to the life-satisfaction that Sumner builds his theory on. Indeed, there are places in Kant that suggests the centrality of such an element, for instance when he says that ‘happiness is a rational being’s consciousness of the agreeableness of life which without interruption accompanies his whole existence’ (CPrR 22). Is there room for an emphasis on the importance of such life-satisfaction within the framework elaborated here? My suggestion would be that life-satisfaction is something we always aim at and, thus, something that is always included in one’s conception of happiness. The goal of life-satisfaction is, of course, a meta-goal that presupposes that we have a conception of happiness to begin with and it might perhaps therefore be seen as strange that such a goal can be included in one’s conception of happiness. But I would say that it is a goal that is not included in one’s conception of happiness in the same way as other goals, it is one that lies inherent in having a conception of happiness at all. The having of a conception of happiness is something we acquire as we move from being, when very young, creatures with just brute impulses to being agents who lead lives and who care about the way our lives will fare – is this not something that is difficult to make sense of except as involving coming to want to be satisfied with the way our lives go? It is just that what one wants is not the feeling of satisfaction per se, but to be able to judge that one’s life is going well (an act of judgment that is inherently agreeable). I would also say that this is a goal that serves to structure one’s conception of happiness in the sense that even if one does not have an algorithm to determine when one should feel satisfied with one’s life there will certainly be some basic goods that one understands as the things that one must achieve in order to be satisfied with one’s life as going well – not perfect, but at least well enough. Yet even if life-satisfaction is very important, both as a good to be achieved and in being involved in structuring our conceptions of happiness, it must be remembered that one’s life can still go well without one feeling life-satisfaction, although given the way it is going it will be even better if one feels that too.

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To sum up, then: Happiness consists in the realization of our conceptions of happiness. These are ideals of the imagination that are formulated in response to the fact that we are striving towards a variety of things together with our awareness of leading lives within which these strivings take place, lives which we can judge as going more or less well. Although formally it is we ourselves as individuals that constitute these conceptions of happiness we do so from materials that are available to us in the concrete space of reasons within which we strive and lead our lives and in reality our freedom to articulate conceptions of happiness is thus very much limited.

5.4 The Role of Happiness in Deliberation

There is an interesting line of objection that strikes at the core of the stark contrast between morality and the pursuit of happiness that is painted by philosophers like Butler, Kant, and Sidgwick (and which I have adhered to here); it is an objection that has been suggested by Thomas Scanlon20 and which directs itself to the prevalent tendency among many philosophers to understand the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental feature of human beings. Scanlon notes how there are two basic levels of practical thinking where the ideal of happiness might play a key role. To begin with, there is the level of everyday thinking and acting, all the minute little choices that go to make up the vast majority of decisions that we have to make throughout our lives; but there is also the level of comprehensive thinking about one’s life, a level that concerns choices which will in obvious ways determine the courses our lives will take, e.g. what career to pursue and whether or not to be a parent. According to Scanlon, these kinds of choices are not such that we make them with an eye towards our happiness. The point here is not that we would make a false statement if, when pressed on the matter, we would acknowledge that the choices we make are ones that contribute to our happiness. The point is rather that it would be construed to say these things. When we deliberate about what we are to do, the boundary between matters of happiness and other concerns is blurred; while we might tend to do things that we would say contribute to our happiness, there are usually many other different reasons why we pursue the things we do and from the individual’s point of view it would be highly artificial to keep these sharply distinct. To a certain extent, Scanlon is making a phenomenological point that is clearly valid: the idea of our happiness rarely features in our deliberations and perhaps we would even view with some suspicion a person for whom it did –

20 What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 126-33. Scanlon uses ‘well-being’ rather than ‘happiness’, but that makes no difference for the argument pursued here.

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and not just for the obvious reason that we might fear that such a person would have the kind of instrumental attitude towards us that would make us unable to really trust her as a friend; we would probably also feel that she would suffer from a somewhat neurotic relation to her own life. Yet, plausible as this is, it might perhaps be wondered whether it is not at the same time quite beside the point. We do not dwell on the obvious. Those things that we know well are second nature to us and there is no need to make them explicit by reciting them; and yet nonetheless these things can very well form the basis of the way we act. It seems unreasonable to demand that our conceptions of happiness feature prominently in the foreground of our deliberations. Even so, we might like to demand something of an alleged basis for acting. Scanlon suggests that if happiness is to be said to matter in our deliberations it should at least constitute a distinct ‘sphere of compensation’,21 i.e. something within which gains and losses can be weighed against each other and our alternatives evaluated with respect to the net balance of happiness they would yield; but there is nothing in our experience as agents that suggests that there are occurring any calculations of the net balance of happiness, certainly not explicitly and even to claim that we do so implicitly seems rather far-fetched. However, even if it might be true that we do not think in terms of our happiness when deliberating about what to do, is it not a rather striking fact that were we to be pressed on the matter, when having decided to do something, we could probably say without giving it much thought whether success in our undertakings would be something that makes us better off? What this suggests is that if there is anything deeply flawed with the picture against which Scanlon turns, then it is rather its tendency to understand happiness as constituted through the net balance of a number of ‘building blocks’ than its tendency to see the ideal of happiness as an important factor in our lives. But there really is nothing in the notion of a conception of happiness that implies that we must carry with us an algorithm of happiness (if it did then Scanlon would surely be correct in his criticism); instead, the balancing that is relevant here is much more complex and probably has important holistic elements, i.e. the value of different parts of our lives are affected by how they fit together.22 The kind of act involved in judging how actions and events affect the quality of our lives is better understood as akin to aesthetic appreciation than as some form of quasi-mathematical operation. Nevertheless, given the importance the Kantian grants our conceptions of happiness, it might seem like somewhat of an embarrassment that few of us have

21 Ibid., p. 127. 22 I argue this point more fully in ‘Good Lives: Parts and Wholes’, American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2001).

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anything remotely resembling a comprehensive conception of happiness. In fact, as already suggested we would probably view with skepticism any person who had formulated a definitive list of things that were supposed to constitute a conception of happiness. After all, if to be governed by reason is to be driven towards systematization, should we not have more fully worked out conceptions of happiness than we actually do? Or to put it somewhat differently, if we are beings of reason in a Kantian sense, would we not try getting our conceptions of happiness completely explicit? The simple answer to this kind of question is that even beings governed by reason need not be naïve. Even if there is a drive towards systematicity, it is plainly clear that this drive can never be fulfilled since our happiness concerns empirical matters of an immense complexity and the lives that we try to lead are full of contingencies and unexpected twists and turns. To try to think out in advance a conception of happiness that can be used as a complete map throughout one’s life would be mere folly and not just because there is so much information that we happen not to possess but also because there is some information that we cannot possess in advance: many of the things that become part of our lives are such that we must encounter them first-hand and respond to them in actuality to know how they make us feel and think and what kind of evaluative significance they can have in our lives.23 There might certainly be some variation between different persons, but overall our conceptions of happiness cannot but be vague. To a certain extent, we have to make them up as we go along. Still, this does not mean that our conceptions of happiness are simply tracking our choices and discoveries. What one’s conception of happiness does is to delineate what might be called, borrowing a notion from Barbara Herman, a ‘deliberative field’.24 When we deliberate, certain things seem important, others do not; certain things are live possibilities, others are not; certain things seem valuable, others do not. This structuring effect is the most important role played by our conceptions of happiness. Now, if we consider Scanlon’s suggestion about different modes of thinking then, even if we accept a Kantian model according to which our conceptions of happiness operate in a structuring way rather than as ‘distinct spheres of compensation’, there does still seem to be room to distinguish between two basic kinds of choice which have bearing on matters of happiness.25 First, we

23 Cf. Elijah Millgram, Practical Induction. 24 ‘Making Room for Character’ in Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (eds.), Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 25 Cf. Charles Taylor’s distinction between weak and strong evaluation, ‘What is Human Agency?’ in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 18-20.

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have choices that are intra-parametrical, i.e. they take place within one’s usual deliberative field. Trivial choices clearly fall within this category, but so might some choices that we clearly recognize as key decisions in shaping our lives. Second, there are choices that are parametrical, i.e. they concern changes in the structure of one’s deliberative field. What this means is that they involve changes in one’s evaluative outlook. For instance, one’s deliberative field might previously have been structured in a largely materialist way, with choices being evaluated insofar as they contribute to increasing one’s wealth or advancing one’s career, but then one might come to appreciate other more spiritual matters such as friendship and contemplation. Such changes in one’s outlook are akin to Gestalt shifts in our seeing of things; but just because they are radical, they need not be unsupported. We often have certain fundamental goods that we value and which are such that if they fall, nothing but a radical change can take place. They are also such that we can hardly come to see them as ungrounded without coming to see some other goods as having fundamental status. This is something that we rarely do, but when we do so, we are usually able to cite reasons for what was wrong with our previously cherished fundamental goods. Accordingly, even in this second mode of thinking it is clear that our conceptions of happiness are very much involved in what takes place, while it is still perfectly natural that they need not always figure in the foreground of our thinking. I have been discussing the role of happiness in deliberation and, in fact, on the account given here its main role lies precisely in our deliberations. Since it is something that necessarily fluctuates and will be constantly revised throughout our lives, it is not robust enough to build an ethical theory on. ‘Happiness’ is an ideal which is primarily important in the here and now of deliberation and even if we might at times step back and try to view our lives sub specie aeternitatis, this perspective is not really useful when it comes to assessing our lives. What we have is rather a series of perspectives from those points where we stand at the concrete times when we are thinking about things that affect our happiness. Yet, does not this downplaying of the ideal of happiness put in jeopardy one aspect of our thinking on these matters, namely the way that we sometimes experience ourselves as making discoveries about where our happiness really lies, discoveries that cast the previous parts of our lives in a wholly new light? The answer to this is that there is a mixture of discovery and invention at work here; for instance, as partaking in certain concrete spaces of reasons there are certain default goods that we cannot fail to recognize without in some way being alienated from the space of reasons in question; when we come to recognize some such good then there is a very real sense in which we can justifiably feel that we have discovered something. Additionally, even when it comes to those parts of our conceptions of happiness that involve invention, such as the way that we balance and weave

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together different goods and narrative threads, there is the possibility to invent ourselves in ways that are much more imaginatively alluring and intellectually elegant than what we had before. Even if reason does not impel us to absurd forms of systematization, there is still a certain satisfaction of reason in things coming to fit together better than before and I think that those times when we do feel that we have made progress in the way we understand our lives are often precisely when things fall in place in ways that make them fit better together.

5.5 Why be Moral?

When commenting on Sidgwick in the previous chapter I noted that he himself ended his magnum opus by acknowledging his own failure; and in his eyes the failure in question did not lie in his theory of happiness (even though it was deeply flawed) or in his theory of morality (even though it too was deeply flawed), but in his inability to give some decisive reason for why we should be moral. This problem that troubled Sidgwick is one that already Plato gave a dramatic formulation of in the Republic when he had Glaucon tell the tale about the ring of Gyges: if a person were to be given the power of turning himself invisible and thus be able to commit crimes with impunity, what could we then say to convince him to walk the narrow path? This kind of problem, often summarized in the question ‘Why be moral?’, has been a perennial one in moral philosophy, although its meaningfulness has not gone unchallenged. For instance, in a well-known argument, H. A. Prichard26 claimed that it was in fact an illegitimate question. Prichard’s point was that there are only two ways of answering the question. The first was to give a moral answer, like ‘...because it is your duty’, but that will not do since the person who is asking the question wants a reason to be moral, not just to hear yet again that he ‘should’. The second way is to actually give him a reason that gets its force from without morality, for instance that it lies in his own self-interest to be moral; but then, even if we succeed in convincing him, we have not really turned him into a moral person, we have merely taught him a new way to realize his own self-interest. The question is thus unanswerable and Prichard’s conclusion is that we should just take our obligations as a fact and that is the end of it. But while Prichard simply assumes that a non-moral response to this kind of question must be phrased in terms of prudential gains, there are other ways of approaching it, ways that do not perhaps so much answer the question as try to find some additional fault beyond mere moral vice with the person who does not

26 ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ in Moral Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949).

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act in accordance with morality. The two prime candidates for such attempts at getting at the amoralist is either to show that he is irrational, in some sense of the word, or unfree, in some sense of the word. Indeed, Kant’s main attempt at grappling with this kind of question is of the latter kind, namely when he in the Groundwork identifies the Categorical Imperative as the law of the free will. His idea in the Groundwork that autonomy requires acting on the Categorical Imperative would seem to have the implication that either we act in accordance with the Categorical Imperative or we are just driftwood on the river of natural causation. However, as noted in Chapter 3, this kind of position is deeply problematic since it would seem to result in the position that we are only accountable for our actions when we act morally and otherwise not. Clearly, this is a most unattractive position and Kant himself does move away from it in the second Critique and even further so in the Religion, where he introduces his doctrine of radical evil, which in many ways brings his approach close to an existentialist one. It should be made clear right away that by evil being radical, Kant does not mean what it might sound like. He is not making the point that there is a special kind of immoral depth to which certain diabolically ruthless individuals, like Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot, sink – rather he is making the point that in human beings the capacity for evil is ineradicable: however much we strive, however much good we do, our capacity for evil always remain with us as our constant companion. Evil in this sense is ineradicable precisely because we are free. Additionally, it should be pointed out that evil for Kant is not a matter of performing certain particularly nasty deeds, but rather of subordinating morality to one’s pursuit of happiness, i.e. of making morality into something that one simply lives up to as long as it does not interfere with one’s pursuit of happiness. In short, the pursuit of happiness is then made the limiting condition of morality rather than, as it should be, vice versa. In this discussion of evil, Kant introduces the notion of Gesinnung, which is usually translated by ‘disposition’ (which is perhaps not an ideal choice of word since today it is hardly a philosophically innocent concept). The simplest way to understand what disposition is about is to see it as a kind of overarching maxim. It is the underlying principle of one’s life. According to Kant, there are only two humanly possible alternatives: the principle of happiness and the principle of morality. What distinguishes them is simply the order of priority assigned to these two aspects. Either we are moral within the bounds of our pursuit of happiness (which is really to not be moral at all) or we pursue our happiness within the bounds of morality. Between these two, there is a free choice. This theory is clearly a product of Kant’s tendency to understand our phenomenal behavior as the result of a single noumenal choice, a choice that lies beyond space and time. Such ideas do however belong to the kind of two-world

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metaphysics that Kant succumbs to at times, but which is still a stance that we should, as argued in Chapter 3, steer clear from in favor of a perspectival understanding of the fundamental Kantian dualities. Even if we do not think in terms of noumenal choices, it is quite clear that we can think about our past histories in terms of how we have conditioned morality and happiness on each other. And here we see an important part of the doctrine of radical evil: when we start thinking about our lives and the principles that underlie them it is inevitable that we will find that we have not always acted on the principle of morality, we have at times sacrificed morality for the sake of our happiness. We might of course have done so more or less, but we have all done so. The perspectival approach does however suggest that we can look at the matter from two directions, the first having to do with analyzing our motivations at the time of acting, i.e. in terms of our operative reasons, the second having to do with whether we were justified in acting as we did. While our operative reasons are something that we can try to ascertain in a detached way, the question of whether certain reasons are justifying reasons is one which we cannot approach in a similarly detached way since in the here and now of normative evaluation we see reasons in the light of our present evaluative outlook. What this means is that if we are thinking about our dispositions in a way that includes both of these modes, and even if we primarily focus on the first one we are never able to simply turn the second one off, we are not merely involved in a statistical exercise where we count our moral lapses, but also always a first-order evaluative one (and in the perspectival model this evaluative point of view is the aspect that corresponds to the noumenal choice in the two-world metaphysics): do we think that we were justified in doing as we did or not? In that moment of reflection, the moral disposition lies in one’s principled stance towards one’s prior mistakes and one’s future possible ones – evil is radical in the sense that we always carry with us a legacy of immorality, but it is not radical in the sense that we cannot in the here and now of reflection take a principled stance against it. In that moment of reflection we can also, given that we take the moral stand, look forward towards our pursuits with the view that we will be worthy of the happiness that we hopefully will achieve. Now, even if we do not do so explicitly we can still be said to do it through the way that we actually behave and many of our concrete processes of reasoning presuppose one of these principles, of morality or happiness, as a backgrounding condition of their intelligibility, in the sense that we always reason from at least some basic orders of priority and there is none more basic than this. But because of their fundamental nature, the ‘choice’ we make between them cannot but be radical and, thus, something which we cannot demand of philosophy that it should be able to provide us with a guide to.

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On a concluding note, it might however be wondered whether the kind of drastic questions considered above are not misleading in the sense that they seem to be related to a kind of solipsistic anxiety that might make sense in the study chamber, but which is far removed from everyday life. Not that questions like ‘Why should I be moral?’ or ‘Why should I care about others?’ logically follow from questions like ‘Do other people have minds?’ or ‘Is there an external world?’, nor vice versa, but they are similar in the sense that they seem to push matters to a point where it starts getting difficult to see how such qualms could be eased at all and perhaps the bare fact that we are able to formulate such questions should not be taken as an indication of them being meaningful philosophical questions. Of course, Kant himself was no stranger to the idea that reason might often lead simply into cobwebs of confusion: reason allows us to ask certain questions and then we simply set out to answer them, when perhaps we would do best in thinking about the questions that we put instead. In the debate concerning other minds, there is an oft-quoted phrase by Wittgenstein that holds an important insight: ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’27 The point in that case is that it is not all that clear what it would mean to doubt that the other has a mind. We have certain modes of relating to people and then we might, when we philosophize, obviously construct opinions which these modes of relating can be said to presuppose. But the founding elements here are hardly such opinions, but rather simply these practices and modes of relating to other people; and just as we are being said to believe in the existence of other minds on account of the way we behave, we cannot be said to suffer from disbelief in this matter other than on account of the way we behave, i.e. the only real form of coming to have disbelief here would be to go through a deep change of attitude towards others and not some mere philosophical change of opinion. In a similar vein, when we philosophize about morals it is all too easy to forget just how pervasively moral we already are and how this morality is fundamentally a way of relating to other people rather than a set of beliefs that we choose to act on from time to time. The drastic kind of questions that tend to preoccupy moral philosophers, like ‘Why should I be moral?’ or ‘Why should I care about the happiness of others?’, are questions we ask ourselves not before entering human society, but after we already are moral (or immoral), after we already have come to care about others (or disregard them). This means that we are not very likely to suddenly go on an amoralist rampage if we made the philosophical discovery that there is nothing more to morality than, for instance, a set of customs that we have been brought

27 Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1953), p. 178.

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up to act in accordance with. Given that we have been brought up that way, we will have internalized these customs into firm habits and as such, we cannot simply rid ourselves of them. Nevertheless, these are still questions variants of which may come to worry us even in the midst of life and it might certainly be a source of discomfort to find oneself stuck with habits that severely restrict one’s choices and which there is not any deeper point to. However, the kind of worry alluded to above, is perhaps not best conceptualized in the way of Plato and those who have followed him. Most of us are not self-serving egoists that constantly keep asking ‘What’s in it for me?’ Ethical ideals are something that we are already prepared to sacrifice much for; sometimes people are even prepared to lay down their lives for them. It would therefore be nice to know that such sacrifices are not in vain, that they are not merely done for the sake of an illusion, even if it is an illusion that one cannot shake. This kind of moral doubt is probably best interpreted as an existential doubt, reminiscent of what religious people can experience. It is a doubt that is not merely directed towards future actions, as would a doubt about the instrumental rationality of being moral, but which has more to do with the sense of meaning that one’s life has to oneself. Both the religious and the moral person have behind them personal histories of certain behavior and their firm convictions have shaped their lives in ways that weave together into a whole the momentary, and otherwise disparate, fragments that constitute their lives. To start doubting one’s moral or religious convictions is then not merely a question of doubting what one should do now, it is to question whether that sense of wholeness, which has given meaning to one’s past actions, has been based on a lie. To be deeply moral can therefore be seen on an analogy with being religious,28 it is to have faith in morality as a guiding light in one’s life, to have a belief in Good as something real. Moreover, even if we do not lead lives where we sacrifice our selfish interests for the sake of being moral, there is still a minimal level of moral behavior that we codify in our laws. We enforce those laws. That would be something with which we could feel more comfortable if we knew that those laws were just in a sense that goes beyond the bleak view on justice taken by, say, Thrasymachus.29

28This analogy can be found in Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), Chapter 16. 29 This, then, is what I say justice is, the same in all cities, the advantage of the established rule. Since the established rule is surely stronger, anyone who reasons correctly will conclude that the just is the same everywhere, namely, the advantage of the stronger.’, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 338E.

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If the question ‘Why be moral?’ is taken in this more modest sense, then it seems as if there is a third way to answer it: ‘Because Good exists and this is why’. In fact, it is in this sense that the question is important, because it is if we take the question in this manner that we fill a genuine need in answering it. The purely self-interested rational amoralist does not exist anyway. He is merely a figment of the imagination, albeit a philosophical one. The idea behind trying to address him might be that, since he is supposedly the most difficult person to win over, if I can produce arguments that would have an effect on him, I have arguments that will have an effect on anyone. But is this a sound idea? Is it not reasonable to suspect that answers that will be satisfactory to the amoralist will be wholly unsatisfactory to the moral person? Why would we want that result? Accordingly, the objective of the moral theorist should not be to show that we must be moral on pain of irrationality, unfreedom, or unhappiness, it is to show how the moral life is a reasonable one, to make sense of it in a way that does not subvert it. Rather than trying to show that the amoralist is unreasonable, we should try to show that the truly moral person is not.

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6. Morality as a Limiting Condition

[A]s beings endowed with reason and freedom, happiness is far from being first, nor indeed is it unconditionally an object of our maxims; rather this object is worthiness to be happy, i.e., the agreement of all our maxims with the moral law. That this is objectively the condition whereby alone the wish for happiness can square with legislative reason – therein consists the whole precept of morality; and the moral cast of mind consists in the disposition to harbor no wish except on these terms. – Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 41-2n

Having considered the matter of personal happiness and the relation between happiness and morality, we now turn to morality itself. I have already given some reasons why we should have an understanding of morality that recognizes a dualism of practical reason, the main problem with eudaimonism being that even if adherents of this approach have to a large extent been correct in pointing out the way in which many impartial models of morality fail to do justice to the personal and partial bonds that play such an important role in our lives, eudaimonism itself ultimately perverts these relationships by not doing justice to the ethical alterity of the Other, instead reducing her to nothing but a component of my happiness. The two principal contenders among those theories that stress impartiality, and thus also the two approaches that have been the two principal targets of criticism in contemporary eudaimonism, are Kantianism and consequentialism. While theorists in both these camps might try to overcome the dualism of practical reason in different ways, both of these approaches still build on a contrast between the perspective of self-concern and the impartial perspective of morality. In this chapter, I will do two main things. First, I will discuss consequentialism and try to show why it is an unsatisfactory model for conceptualizing the impartiality that characterizes the moral stance. Second, I will try to develop an understanding of Kantian ethics that gives us a reasonable way of thinking about the place of impartiality in our lives and also say a few words about how Kantian morality should be understood in terms of the role that the Categorical Imperative and moral principles should play in our lives; or to put it somewhat differently: how we should understand what is involved in leading a moral life.

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6.1 Consequentialism: Impartiality as Impersonality

Traditional Western morality is clearly not consequentialist, and yet some people steeped in the Western tradition still seem to find consequentialism obviously correct. In fact, consequentialism seems to be a position that people are drawn to when they begin to think philosophically about morality, similar to how they tend to be drawn to hedonism when they start to think philosophically about the human good (and if they are prone to both tendencies they become classical utilitarians). Fred Feldman expresses this powerful allure of consequentialism well when stating his moral credo in one succinct sentence: ‘For as long as I remember, it has seemed obvious to me that our fundamental moral obligation is to do the best we can – to make the world as good as we can make it.’1 One could perhaps put it somewhat differently, for instance by saying that it is obvious that it is always better to create a greater good than a lesser, but the basic point would still be the same. When seeing things in this way it becomes virtually impossible to understand how one could not be a consequentialist. There might certainly be a whole range of issues left before reaching a satisfactory version of consequentialism, but that it is some kind of consequentialism that will be the correct moral theory is as clear as can be. Samuel Scheffler has traced this seductiveness of consequentialism to the standard understanding of rationality as maximization. What we have, then, are two rational stances: egoism as maximizing in the interest of oneself and morality, which is supposed to embody some kind of impartiality, as maximizing in the interest of all.2 Any attempt at finding some middle ground runs the risk of getting caught in what Scheffler calls ‘a kind of normative squeeze’3 between these two positions, i.e. it will have to defend its rationality against both of them. Scheffler’s way of putting matters also makes it understandable why, even if the ethical egoist is a piece of philosophical fiction, consequentialists still tend to take him seriously and see it as important to win him over to the side of morality: he is in a way also a consequentialist – not in the usual sense in which consequentialism is understood as embracing interpersonal impartiality, but the kind of egoist that tends to figure in these contexts is one who is characterized by an intrapersonal impartiality, i.e. he lives by the same standard of rationality

1 Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1. 2 Rawls also notes this parallel and sees it as important in leading people to a consequentialist stance: ‘The most natural way, then, of arriving at utilitarianism (although not, of course, the only way of doing so) is to adopt for society as a whole the principle of rational choice for one man.’ A Theory of Justice, p. 19. 3 ‘Agent-Centred Restrictions, Rationality, and the Virtues’ in Samuel Scheffler (ed.), Consequentialism and its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 252.

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with respect to his own interests, being their executive rather than their master, as does the (moral) consequentialist with respect to the interest of all. Consequentialism as I discuss it here is however a theory that embraces the agent-neutrality of reasons and values (or goods) and that has a straightforward view on the relation between these: values (or goods) are translatable into reasons having to do with promotion, i.e. that something is valuable can be understood as giving us reason to promote it. The agent-neutrality means that if something is a value or reason for someone, then it is a value or reason for everyone. Thus, when I qua agent face the world looking for reasons to act, I will draw on a pool of reasons that we as agents all have in common. In this pool, all reasons are equal in that only their weights will matter directly. My actual position in the world will matter indirectly in that it affects which reasons apply to me in the sense that I will be able to act on some of them more easily than on others. On the whole, however, the way I am justified to act will be determined by the total balance of reasons. Consequentialism can thus be characterized as a form of deontic monism, i.e. a moral theory that issues a single demand on us: that we should act so that overall outcomes become as good as possible. What I would like to suggest here is that the line of thought that lies behind this picture does not so much make reasonable that I come to understand myself as being hooked up to a common pool of reasons, but to me being disconnected from the realm of justifying reasons altogether. While it certainly seems true that some kind of impartiality is essential to morality, it should be made clear that the consequentialist move towards impartiality involves an appeal to a specific understanding of impartiality, a depersonalized one. I am being told to dislodge myself from my subjective point of view and take an objective stance. It will then be obvious that I am really not more important than anyone else is; and with this insight in mind, I am supposed to turn to making the world as good as possible. In attempting to characterize this manner of thinking Rawls has remarked that it ‘mistakes impersonality for impartiality.’4 That it actually is a mistake to understand impartiality as impersonality is naturally something the consequentialist would not agree with, but if we can agree on the fact that morality involves impartiality as an essential component then we should also be able to agree on the suggestion that if we wish to decide between consequentialism and Kantianism as moral theories, a key factor in doing this is to determine which of these theories that provides us with the most satisfactory understanding of impartiality.

4 A Theory of Justice, p. 190. Rawls discusses classical utilitarianism, but the point he makes is valid against other forms of consequentialism as well. His argument is that this mistake leads to a failure in taking the separateness of persons seriously.

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Even if the above suggestion is a reasonable one, there is for the task set in this section still one significant problem which there is really no way of solving adequately. Just as there are many different versions of Kantian ethics, and a consequentialist would be hard-pressed to find a generic argument that would defeat them all, there are a number of different forms of consequentialism and one cannot expect to find one argument that will strike at them all. Yet, there is hardly room here for any extensive discussion of all different varieties of consequentialism. The two consequentialists that I will focus on are Sidgwick and Parfit, two thinkers who lie fairly close to each other (Parfit is probably best understood as a continuant of Sidgwick), and while there are perhaps others who are more technically sophisticated than these two, I still think that they are philosophers in whom the powerful allure of consequentialism makes itself felt and my main reason for focusing on them is that in arguing against them one might perhaps exorcise that seductiveness of consequentialism which still comes to possess so many philosophers. Let us begin with Sidgwick. Take his Axiom of Rational Benevolence: ‘each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him.’ Even if one accepts this, there are clearly two very different ways of drawing one’s lesson from it. The first is the one Sidgwick himself intended, namely that the good of the other is just as important as my good in the sense that they are both important. The second is that what we have here is the kind of equality of importance that lies in there being no importance at all involved, i.e. from the point of view of the universe we are both of no significance. Sidgwick wants to move us into accepting his view by placing us in a position where we cannot find any reason to discriminate between ourselves and others, but for that to be a meaningful exercise we have to do it from a perspective from which reasons make sense to begin with – otherwise it would be like placing us in a dark room and taking the fact that we cannot distinguish between red and blue as a proof of there being no difference between them. Accordingly, what I would like to be shown first is that it makes sense at all to speak about such a thing as ‘importance’ from the point of view of the universe, the view from nowhere, or whatever we wish to call the impersonal take on the world that consequentialists understand as the essence of impartiality. This detached mode of seeing the world and the people inhabiting it is like in that scene in The Third Man where Holly Martins and Harry Lime ride in a cab on the Ferris wheel and Harry, who is giving a small speech defending his actions, draws on the physical distance created to the people below, commenting ‘Look down there. Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving

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forever?’ The answer to this question is of course that if you look at these people in that way, you would not. It should be said that Harry is not reaching the kind of heights required for taking the point of view of the universe; he is still very much committed to his own pursuit of happiness in general and his own lethally fraudulent schemes in particular. He continues: ‘If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?’ Harry is what Nagel has characterized as a practical solipsist, or at least very close to being one. He does not really argue with Holly Martins; what he provides is something that sounds like an argument but he is not submitting himself to the scrutiny of reason that is essential to real argument, and the antidote is not that he should fully embrace the point of view of the universe; had he done that he would simply have seen himself as being nothing but a dot as well. From that perspective, human beings certainly are nothing but dots moving about for an infinitesimally short while. Do they matter? Given this take on the world it is difficult not only to see that they do but also how they even could matter. From the point of view of the universe there simply are no reasons at all and this is why Sidgwick’s way of putting the matter is deceptive; he asks for a reason that tells against his conclusion and that makes the ensuing silence imply that his conclusion is correct. But the silence is just the silence of nothingness and if it says us anything, then it is simply this: from the point of view of the universe there are no reasons, no differences in importance, no oughts, no normativity.5 If we fail to see this, it is just because we are like Harry

5 Wlodek Rabinowicz makes the same kind of point in ‘Value Based on Preferences’ (p. 19) and the participant model he there puts forward as a version of preference utilitarianism is one that recommends ‘not a detached objectivity but a universalized subjectivity’ (p. 4). Another representative of such an alternative approach is the utilitarianism of Richard Hare, see for instance Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), especially Chapters 5-7. Through an analysis of the language of morals Hare tries to push us into a method of moral deliberation which has us putting ourselves in the positions of the ones affected by our actions, a process which if done correctly will lead us to incorporating their preferences into our own original set. Rather than taking the stance of a detached arbitrator, I will internalize the conflict of interests that might exist between me and others, and the inter-personal will become intra-personal. Now, although sympathetic identification with others does seem to have a place in morality I find Hare’s vacuum-cleaner account of it highly implausible, even as an ideal only fully attainable by archangels. If I identify myself with another, I might definitely learn things, but I do not just suck up all his preferences and internalize them. The intelligibility of our preferences depends on the way that they are situated in the context of our projects, plans, tastes, and lives in general and it is unreasonable to think that we can simply internalize any given preference in a way that makes it stand on an equal footing with those preferences that are properly our own – unless, of course, we are supposed to have a detached relation to our

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Lime in failing to fully take the impersonal point of view (although we certainly fail in a more sympathetic way). However, should we not be charitable to Sidgwick? After all, is it not merely a figure of speech to talk about ‘the point of view of the universe’? Yet, true as this may be, I find that what we have here is a very revealing figure of speech. The whole point of the consequentialist enterprise is that I should come to look at myself as nobody special, as just one individual among a multitude of others. Viewing myself in such a detached way, I see only a whirl of physical and mental events that, to the extent that I succeed in such a shift of perspective, are without meaning or value. What this means is that if we take the outside perspective and really get into it, not only will we not see the Axiom of Rational Benevolence as self-evident we will not see the Axiom of Prudence as such either. Of course, even if we realize this we will in actuality still embrace both morality and prudence, but then that is just because when we leave the study chamber we are, somewhat like Hume, able to shrug our shoulders and go on to socialize with our friends and compatriots. Even if the above criticism of Sidgwick would be unfair it does of course remain a fact that he himself regarded his position as a failure – not because he thought himself unable to show how consequentialism is the correct conceptualization of impartiality in the practical sphere, but because he was unable to show us why we should be impartial rather than partial. If we move on to contemporary moral philosophy, the same kind of problem is still taken seriously by moral philosophers and the main example of a consequentialist who follows in Sidgwick’s footsteps is probably Derek Parfit. What he tries to do, through considerations of personal identity, is to show how insubstantial the distinction between ‘me’ and ‘others’ really is. Parfit argues for a reductionist view on personal identity according to which personal identity over time consists in nothing more than psychological continuity and/or connectedness, i.e. there is no essential ‘me’ that is imbued in a person and stays the same over the whole course of a person’s life. If this is correct, then there does not seem to be any definitive difference between my future self and other selves; and since I attach importance to my future self, should I not in the name of consistency attach importance to other selves? There is no place here to rehearse all the details of Parfit’s discussion of personal identity; suffice to say that he presumes that if personal identity is to be

own preferences, but then we are back at square one. Accordingly, although this model can seem attractive, it remains to be seen how it could be elaborated without simply reintroducing an ideal of impartiality as impersonality. Hare has tried and failed, while Rabinowicz has not yet presented any picture of how the participant model is supposed to really work.

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as robust as common sense takes it to be then there must be some deep metaphysical fact about us that persists through time, whether it be a Cartesian ego or something else, but since there is nothing philosophically credible that fits this bill we are forced to conclude that common sense is in error. Sidgwick’s failure was due to the fact that on his account there was a sharp line between my good and the good of others, but if we take away the distinctness of the individual person then the difference between my good and the good of others no longer has the same meaning. In a way, Parfit thus relocates the dualism of practical reason: instead of it being about the difference between the standpoint of prudent egoism and that of interpersonal impartiality, it becomes about the difference between the standpoint of the fleeting now and interpersonal impartiality. Parfit is clearly a revisionary metaphysician and a radical one at that: the picture he is attacking is not just some localized cultural phenomenon, it is a view that has probably been held in some form by most human beings since human beings started to think in terms of reasons for acting. This is something he is well aware of, although he does not find himself totally without allies: ‘Nagel once claimed that it is psychologically impossible to believe the Reductionist View. Buddha claimed that, though this is very hard, it is possible. I find Buddha’s claim to be true.’6 I would however suggest that the reason why we are at least somewhat moved by Parfit’s line of argument to begin with it is probably due precisely to the fact that we never abandon the commonsensical view of the self. For when Parfit draws the parallel between prudence and morality, there are of course two consistent positions to take: on the one hand, the one that we will tend towards, namely that the good of others matters in the same way as our own good; on the other hand, the view that our own good at other points of time matters just as little, i.e. not at all, as the good of others. The fact that we do care so deeply about our own future good means that we are psychologically unable to see the second alternative as a live one; but that is just us being unable to really believe in the Reductionist view of the self. Although I am inclined to side with Nagel on the psychological issue, my immediate concern is with what follows from the Reductionist View. Buddha was not a consequentialist. The lesson he was trying to teach was not that we should try to satisfy the desires of others as well as our own, but that we should try to extinguish our own. Parfit’s view is that since one does not really exist as an individual, one does not matter more than others do. Buddha’s view was that since one does not really exist as an individual, nothing (in this world at least) really matters. Of course, these views do not contradict each other: if nothing

6 Ibid., p. 280.

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really matters, then I do not matter more than others do. Now, I tend to believe that Buddha was the one who saw the real implications of the Reductionist View on the self. Parfit states that on his view

[i]t becomes more plausible, when thinking morally, to focus less upon the person, the subject of experiences, and instead to focus more upon the experiences themselves. It becomes more plausible to claim that, just as we are right to ignore whether people come from same or different nations, we are right to ignore whether experiences come within the same or different lives.7

Parfit assumes that certain experiences will be grounding justifying reasons for acting, but such reasons do not just float around essentially disjointed from persons. Were I to stretch my mind to see the world in the way that Parfit here envisions it, then what I see are just experiences. No values. No justifying reasons. Just an immense whirl of beliefs and desires, totally without point or meaning. It amounts to momentarily achieving something like satori, the state Zen Buddhists strive after, a transcendence of existence through a detachment grounded in realizing that although things happen, they do not matter. It is quite possible that one can find some kind of spiritual tranquility in such a view on the world. But the justification of consequentialist morality? That is considerably more doubtful. Thus, Parfit shares a common problem with Sidgwick in that both their approaches are negative: they try to show that we have no reason to be biased towards ourselves; but they fail to show that we have any reason to act at all. Parfit does bring up the problem that it is ‘sometimes claimed that, unlike rocks or stars, there cannot be objective moral values’8 and he provides a somewhat peculiar refutation of the skeptic:

Suppose that, unless I move, I shall be killed by a falling rock, and that what I most want is to survive. Do I have a reason to move? It is undeniable that I do. This claim would have been accepted in all civilizations, at all times. This claim is true.

After all, the Reductionist View of personal identity has hardly been accepted in all civilizations, at all times, so it is a bit difficult to see what gives Parfit the right to lean on common sense when he takes himself to have shown how deeply

7 Ibid., p. 341. It should be noted that Parfit really expresses himself very cautiously. He never claims that he has given some absolute grounding of consequentialism; the Reductionist View simply makes a consequentialist stance more plausible. However, since we will tend to be consequentialists to the extent that we draw the implications of this view to its limits, what I will discuss here is such an extreme interpretation. 8 Ibid., p. 452.

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misguided common sense is in a matter so fundamental to questions about our agency as the nature of the self. Instead, we should say that the reason why the skeptic does not find any moral values or reasons is that he looks for them in the wrong places. He looks for them in the same way that Parfit looks for ‘the further fact’ that is to give substance to personal identity over time. He wants them to be there just like rocks and stars are there; but if we play that game, then the skeptic will win. Stars and rocks are impersonal, justifying reasons are not. I fully agree with Parfit that there is no deep metaphysical fact that ties together the individual at different times to an identical person. Rather the conception of self that underlies common sense is a construct; but, as we have already seen, the fact that something is a construct does not mean that it is not real, it just means that it is not there in the same way that rocks and stars are. What is more, this particular construct is not just one that we happen to have. If a conception of happiness is necessary for us in order to have the kind of normative navigational bearing that allows us to participate in the space of reasons, then the view of oneself as persisting through time is a necessary postulate: a backgrounding belief that I must have in order to formulate an intelligible conception of happiness.9 And if I believe in this self and all my peers believe in this self (one might perhaps think that strictly speaking they must only believe in their own selves but they cannot have this conception of self without regarding it as a universal), then this self exists as a social fact and it persists through time. There is no deep metaphysical fact about George Bush, Jr. that makes him the 43rd President of the United States, but he nevertheless is just that. And there is no deep metaphysical fact about me that persists through time, but I nevertheless persist. And if we can devise ingenious thought experiments, e.g. about teletransportation accidents, where we find it difficult to say in what sense the afflicted person persists, that simply has no relevance. In the everyday practices through which we constitute ourselves as beings persisting through time we are not in the business of constructing selves for victims of teletransportation accidents, we are in the business of constructing selves for the form of agency that we exercise here and now.

9 Korsgaard pursues a similar argument in ‘Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit’ in Creating the Kingdom of Ends, although it is framed in more general terms of planning rather than conceptions of happiness. Marya Schechtman also makes a similar point in The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 101, where she suggests that one cannot be a person at all without having a narrative self-conception, which of course presupposes an underlying idea of a persisting subject of this narrative.

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6.2 Reasoning and Immanent Detachment

When Parfit states that ‘our reasons for acting should become more impersonal,’10 he is pointing in the wrong direction. Since he is talking about justifying reasons, what his way of thinking will lead to is not the establishment of true morality but the death of morality. If we are to ground morality, what we can hope for is the existence of categorical reasons, reasons that apply to us simply qua agents. These are however reasons that will have to be grasped, just as the unity of one’s life is grasped, from the inside of the agent’s perspective on the world. The reason why almost everyone agrees with Parfit that he would have a justifying reason to move were he about to be crushed by a falling rock is precisely that we think of this matter in the deeply subjective way which characterizes us as agents. From the subjective point of view my operative reasons are, under normal circumstances, understood by me as justifying reasons, while from the objective point of view they are at best factors in a causal chain that can serve to explain my behavior. I suspect that most philosophers, at least in the Anglophone tradition, would agree that if I look at my life sub specie aeternitatis, it has no real meaning. It is puzzling why many of them still insist that values and justifying reasons can be seen as real from such a point of view; or to take it from a different angle: whereas most of them would not say that this is the perspective from which to consider the meaning of one’s life, many of them still seem to think that it is the perspective from which to consider values and justifying reasons. Of course, we should not abandon the idea that morality essentially involves impartiality, but it would seem that we must find some alternative manner of conceptualizing this impartiality, one that allows us to understand the detachment necessarily involved in impartiality in a way that does not turn it into something that disconnects us from the human life-world in which we as agents live. Now, let us consider for a while Nagel’s notion of the practical solipsist. This kind of individual is someone whose reasons for doing things are always anchored in himself in the sense that he cannot see a reason for doing something for the sake of the other without being able to trace this reason to something that involves his own conception of happiness. Of course, just like standard solipsism, this is a philosophical construction – although while the standard solipsist is best seen as altogether a philosophical piece of fiction, the practical solipsist is probably an ideal type that at least some people approach. While there is a clearly an obvious sense in which even the practical solipsist recognizes the reality of the Other (i.e. in the sense that the standard solipsist is thought not to

10 Ibid., p. 443.

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recognize it: as an other mind) the Nagelian parallel suggests that there still is some sense in which the practical solipsist does not recognize the reality of the Other; in what sense can this be? One answer that suggests itself given the terminology favored here is that she fails to relate to the Other’s pursuit of happiness in the way that she relates to her own, but that would still be a way of expressing things that lies too close to the consequentialist model. There is an inherent asymmetry between my happiness and the happiness of the Other; an asymmetry that shows itself in that my deliberations about my happiness are prudential while my deliberations about the happiness of the Other are moral. The reason for this is that my conception of happiness is a backgrounding feature of my agency, something that I have to have if I am to be an agent at all. To be sure, we might conceive of a form of detachment that involves the individual stepping back from his own conception of happiness, viewing it as an anatomist, perhaps asking himself: ‘what reason have I to pursue these things?’ – but this is something to which there can be no answer since without one’s conception of happiness one loses one’s normative bearing and would not have anything that gives one a sense of place in the space of reasons. This kind of ‘stepping back’ is not an achievement of clarity about one’s agency; it is a form of practical suicide.11 The reason for this is that since the space of reasons is socially constituted, and thus a human creation, one must be an involved participant in human affairs to be able to partake in it and one cannot be thus involved without having a conception of happiness, i.e. at least some rough backgrounding idea about what it would mean to fare well or ill through this participation. This does not mean that all reasons must be understood in terms of self-interest, just that for the space of reasons to be a meaningful space for us to lead our lives within, we must have a stake in the goings-on that constitute it. As argued above, the move to a point of view of the universe does not provide the kind of complementary stance to our everyday behavior that one might have hoped for. It gives us an image of one form of detachment, what might be called a transcendent detachment, though it is hardly the kind of detachment that makes morality intelligible; but I would suggest that there is another form of detachment, one that in fact comes so natural to us that we hardly think of it as a form of detachment at all. It is the kind of detachment that is involved in our practices of giving and taking reasons. When we do so in a thoroughly involved way we partake in these practices in a mode of being that is best characterized as a form of self-abandonment: we reason together and though

11 I borrow the notion of ‘practical suicide’ from Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, pp. 161-64.

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we might all have our own ideas about where we want the argument to lead we still follow the path plotted by the interchanging of reasons between us. The reasons that we give and take are not objective, i.e. they are not independent of what we all actually take as reasons, but they are intersubjectively valid in the sense that the way that I am placed in the space of reasons means that I am committed to making certain moves in response to certain other moves. I do not have the power to single-handedly determine what will count as good reasons in the situations that I come to face. Since this submission of the individual to a detached mode of reasoning is something that is always based in a relation to an Other, we could actually say that the fabric of the space of reasons is built on a minimally ethical component, namely that we are answerable to each other. Indeed, if we look at it in the abstract, we could even say that the very existence of a space of reasons presupposes a mutual recognition of the right to question each other. What this means is that justifying ourselves to others is something that comes natural to us; it is not like anything that requires the presence of some contingent desire that we want to do it. What we are dealing with here is a mode of relating to others that involves a form of detachment that might be called immanent detachment. Now, I will not suggest that a commitment to full-fledged morality can be derived as rationally binding from this minimal ethics of the space of reasons, but I would like to suggest that the kind of relation to the Other which it involves can be used to conceptualize the impartiality involved in morality in a better way than the consequentialist alternative. Since the world we live in is as it is – a world in which the ways we live and pursue our happiness always take up some social space that could have been used by others in pursuing their happiness – we exist in an inevitable state of competition over social space. And if we at times are not involved in actual competition we are at least always in a state of potential competition. The constant clashes and crossings of our paths will involve us in countless local games of giving and taking reasons: one person asking the other why she is doing as does and this other responding with some reason that justifies her local actions. There is of course nothing preventing us from simply answering with something in the style of ‘Because I feel like it’, but it is a fact about us that we tend not to. Rather we cite precedents and other circumstances that speak in our favor. We certainly often try to justify precisely the way we feel like behaving, and in a loose sense we then have an instrumental attitude to our search for reasons, but we still tend to give reasons in ways that allow others a possibility of countering our justifications with reasons speaking against them. There is nothing peculiar about this behavior because, in the end, if we do not take reasons cited by others seriously, we cannot take the goods that are included in

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our conceptions of happiness seriously either since these goods are constituted in the same way as the reasons that we are giving and taking in defending our courses of action. Not that it would be psychologically impossible to have a bifurcated thinking that involved a split between these two, but the natural mode of being for us is to take seriously reasons and goods in both of these spheres. Given that we are always already involved in these local practices of defending ourselves it would seem that we can intelligibly ask ourselves, and indeed given the drive towards systematicity that characterizes reason as such it is a natural question, if there is a way to justify ourselves not just to the concrete Other engaged in her particular projects but to the abstract Other, the fellow human being sharing the same social space and pursuing her happiness within it. Indeed, we might even be led to think about what it would mean to justify ourselves to Others as a collective, i.e. what it would mean to pursue my happiness in a way that I can understand as justified in relation to all those other human beings who as fellow occupants of the space of reasons have the right to question me in my local doings. This question is one posed in a state of immanent detachment, but at the same time also at the highest level of abstractness at which I, as a practical being, can consider this form of question. And given the materials available at such a level of abstractness there is in fact not much that we could say since the contents of the space of reasons are constituted in the concrete. But this is where I would suggest that Kantian ethics provides us with a model that makes sense as an answer to the abstract Other, namely that I can claim that I live according to a standard that might be called impartiality as universalizability. What this means is that even if I will in actuality act in ways that hamper your pursuit of happiness (and we will still have a lot of local arguments about such crossing of our paths), the principles according to which I live are still such that I could will them as universal laws governing the social space that we share. Then, what you as a fellow being of reason must at least grant me is that I am consistent in my principles in the sense that I can embrace the idea of you and everybody else living according to the same principles: I am not making an exception of myself. That this answer involves an appeal to consistency is important. Since we are not dealing with an actual argument between me and the Other, then if I am to be able to view my answer as constituting a good reason in the eyes of this abstract Other, it cannot appeal to any contingent values to which she adheres; it must appeal to something which is incumbent on her as a being of reason, and to value consistency is precisely one aspect that is a necessary component of being in the possession of reason as such. Thus, that morality makes us worthy of happiness is to be understood as another way of expressing the idea that if we pursue our happiness according to the standard of universalizability we can do so in a way that we can see as justifiable at the most

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abstract level at which we can justify ourselves to others. At its essential baseline, morality is not about making the world the best possible place (although we might certainly strive to do so); it is a limiting condition on our pursuit of happiness. As already noted, I do not regard the above as an argument that would move the practical solipsist, either as a philosophical abstraction or in more concrete instantiations like Harry Lime, towards adopting a moral behavior. Nevertheless, it does show us that consequentialism is not alone in providing us with a conception of impartiality and that if we search for a wide reflective equilibrium that allows for an understanding of common sense morality that fits with a reasonable metaphysics of the person, then Kantianism is an attractive alternative. At this stage, it might perhaps be objected that the argument here has been unfair to consequentialism since as a counterpart to a coherentist Kantianism aiming only at a descriptive metaphysics of the person it has taken a foundationalist consequentialism with a much more ambitious metaphysical agenda. That the picture provided by Parfit is not an attractive way of conceptualizing our agency in general or morality in particular need not be an objection to someone who just claims that the beauty of consequentialism is simply that it gives us a very lean way of providing a coherent picture of morality. Such a consequentialist could accept that common sense involves a conception of morality as a limiting condition on our happiness, but then claim that this is precisely the kind of practical modus vivendi that consequentialism will recommend since the consequences will be the best if this is the way we behave, pursuing our happiness within the bounds of certain basic restrictions. Yet, the bare fact that consequentialism will issue recommendations that fall in line with common sense can hardly amount to a good reason for adopting it if it at a deep level misconstrues the very structure of morality. And it does. One effect of the conceptualization of morality that consequentialism embodies at the deep level is that certain conflicts that we commonsensically do not regard as moral issues or conflicts are construed as such. We can see this by considering a few examples.12 Take such a thing as deliberating about whether to take an insurance: in the short run I lose money that I could have used for considerably more entertaining things, but in the long run it might save me from landing in a very precarious situation. We have no problem in conceiving of this kind of choice as a conflict between my present self and my future self or in saying that it would be

12 And it is naturally the case with all these examples that depending on what values and methods a specific form of consequentialism embraces it will or will not be affected by these specific examples; but since all they do is to exemplify a structural feature of consequentialism it would be possible to construct similar examples for different forms of consequentialism.

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imprudent of me not take the insurance, but from a consequentialist perspective we have a moral conflict between my present self and my future self. We naturally all agree that planning one’s life is all very well; but in turning this into a moral matter, rather than being simply a matter of prudence, consequentialism falls prey to such a flagrant peculiarity that it can only be taken to show a deep structural flaw in it. Or take this example: if I have a choice between eating a somewhat expensive but delicious dish of food and a slightly cheaper but considerably less tasty one, then we would probably say that I would be acting stupidly in choosing the cheaper dish when there is such a great culinary difference between the two. We might perhaps even stretch things a little and contend that I am acting irrationally if I do so. Yet, consequentialism stretches things even further: according to it, I am acting morally wrong if I choose the cheaper dish. This is just one example; the fact is that, on the consequentialist picture, morality invades the intrapersonal sphere in a way that runs very much counter to the deep structure of common sense. Or take this example: we are walking together on a chilly day and while I have a sweater that warms me, you do not. For a moment, I consider borrowing you my sweater but then I realize that a frail person like myself would probably feel the chill much more and that the sweater does me more good. So I keep the sweater. Even if consequentialism need not demand of me that I actually think of this as a morally right action, it nevertheless is a morally right action according to it and if I borrowed you the sweater my action would be morally wrong – certainly not the greatest of wrongs, but still a moral wrong. Given the above, it seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that even if consequentialism can issue in practical recommendations that fall in line with common sense, it does still stand at a disadvantage. After all, there might be a theory that also issues such commonsensical practical recommendations, but which in addition to this is in accordance with common sense at the deep structural level as well. If there is such a theory, and obviously I think that there is at least one, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that we should adopt it instead. What we need to do now is to make this theory a little more concrete, although the nature of this work will naturally not allow more than a brief elaboration of a rough outline.

6.3 Impartiality as Universalizability

In the preceding section, I argued that the Kantian way of accounting for the relation between self and others is superior compared to the consequentialist one. Yet, while I briefly characterized the Kantian position as ‘impartiality as universalizability’ and said a few words about why it provides us with a

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reasonable way of conceptualizing morality, it remained obscure which role this ideal is supposed to play in our lives and what it would mean more concretely to lead one’s life according to it. Before continuing on to consider these matters, it is perhaps best to go back to the original source for a while. In the Groundwork, Kant presents his readers with the idea of a supreme principle of morality, which he calls the Categorical Imperative, and he then proceeds to present us with a series of formulations of it, the main ones being the following three: The Formula of Universal Law (FUL): Act only on that maxim through which you

can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. (G 421) The Formula of Humanity (FH): Act in such a way that you always treat humanity,

whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end. (G 429)

The Formula of the Kingdom of Ends (FKE): Act on the maxims of a member who

makes universal laws for a merely possible kingdom of ends. (G 439) In considering the relation between these, Kant suggests that the FUL is oriented towards form, the FH towards matter, i.e. ends, and that the FKE is supposed to provide us with an idea, the Kingdom of Ends, through which we can weave these two together. This gives some indication of what he is after, although things are made more complex by the fact that not only does Kant provide us with these formulations, and a few derivatives and variants like the Formula of the Law of Nature13 and the Formula of Autonomy,14 he also manages to express the three main formulae in slightly different ways at different places. The interpreter of Kant is thus faced with a considerable task; but for present purposes, what we need is rather to see how these three main formulations should be understood within the kind of approach elaborated here rather than within Kant’s own. Since I have already indicated how the FUL fits into the picture, what about the other two?

13 ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.’ (G 421) 14 To act under ‘…the Idea of the will of every rational being as a will which makes universal law’ (G 431) or to act so ‘that the will can regard itself as at the same time making universal law by means of its maxim.’ (G 434). Exegetically it is possible to regard the FKE as a variant of the Formula of Autonomy although from a philosophical point of view it is preferable to see the FKE as the third formulation intended to weave together the FUL and the FH since the idea of a Kingdom of Ends brings together these in a better way, cf. H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative (London: Hutchinson & Co.), p. 185.

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If we begin with the FH, it can be seen as an expression of the need to justify oneself to others (and indeed to oneself as well). The moral mode of relating towards others involves treating them not just as stepping stones on the road to one’s own happiness, but as beings to whom one owes justification for the ways in which one behaves. Thus, in a sense, the FH is an expression of the very impulse that leads towards the FUL and rather than being a variation of the FUL it can be understood as a formulation of, to borrow an expression from Scanlon, ‘what we owe to each other’ as social beings. This also means that while the FUL might (hopefully) be used to derive certain concrete precepts about how we are to behave, the FH is more like an expression of a light in which we should view the Other – and it is not the kind of instrumental light exemplified by the attitude of Harry Lime towards his fellow human beings, but one which involves a recognition of their equality with us in the space of reasons (i.e. equality in the sense that as authentic participants in the space of reasons we follow the path that our arguments lead us on and we are all equal in being dominated by our arguments). If something resembling practical solipsism is really a problem in the actual world, I would say that is on the collective rather than the individual level. In fact, if we look historically at the matter, the greatest problems of systematic wrong-doing have to do with different forms of exclusion, i.e. while we recognize roughly the same concrete limiting conditions (not to kill, not to lie, etc.) on our pursuit of happiness, people have at times tended to see these limitations as applicable not to all human beings but only to a certain group, presumably one to which we ourselves happen to belong. Members of other groups then become the kind of entities to whom one does not owe any justifications for the ways in which one acts with respect to them. Movements away from such exclusionary stances are probably what most people today would point to when asked to exemplify ways in which moral progress has been made, e.g. that we have moved away from the exclusionary modes of thought that underpinned slavery as an institution. The subordination of women is a less radical example of such exclusion, although significantly more pervasive and trenchant. Foreigners of different varieties have through all times tended to be treated as not fully ‘one of us’ and thus not given the kind of moral regard that has been reserved for those perceived as our peers. It would be too strong to say that racists, sexists, and others who share this exclusionary mode of relating to humanity are always irrational. But there is something in their position that is not in accordance with reason: they exclude certain others from the class of those beings to whom one owes justifications, in spite of the fact that these persons share in that very capacity in virtue of which we are owed justifications, namely reason. Since this egalitarian element in the Kantian position is not captured as well by the FUL, and since it is nevertheless an essential element in

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the ethical mode of relating to others, the FH is a formulation that should be retained in the theory and which complements the FUL. If we move on to the FKE it is clear that there is a sense in which we are already living in a kingdom of ends to the extent that it is we as human beings who collectively constitute the space of reasons within which we find the ends that guide us in our ways, somewhat like the stars guiding sailors across a vast ocean. Yet, of course, the Kingdom of Ends that Kant is speaking of is an ideality: it is something that has never been concretely realized, and probably never will be. The ideal that the FKE represents is an ideal of social harmony, something which can be seen more clearly in one of the alternative formulations: ‘All maxims as proceeding from our own making of law ought to harmonize with a possible kingdom of ends as a kingdom of nature’ (G 436). It is an ideal that stands for a world where we truly relate to each other as beings of reason, a world where we each pursue our happiness within the bounds of the FUL and with the kind of attitude towards our fellow human beings that is embodied in the FH. Now, if we look beyond the exact ways in which these three formulations are to be understood within the context of the general framework elaborated here, it still stands as reasonably clear that on the account I am suggesting, it is the FUL that is the most important formulation – something which I think is only fair enough since it is the formula Kant first reasons his way towards from his considerations concerning the good will and the value of acting on duty. It is also the formula that gives one the most immediate sense of being a principle that can be applied in concrete ways rather than just standing as a lofty expression of some noble humanist ideal. This being said, the way that the FUL should actually be used is still, over two centuries after the Groundwork was published, a matter of debate. That it is some kind of universalizability test is quite clear, but just what is it that is to be universalizable? This might perhaps seem like a somewhat silly question since Kant’s answer to it is one of the most well-known parts of his moral philosophy; it is even included in his formulation of the FUL. The problem is just that when you look more closely at the matter it is quite possible that you will get a feeling that his answer consists more in providing us with a concept than with an explanation. The crucial concept here is of course that of a ‘maxim’ and according to Kant this is a name for a ‘subjective principle of action’ (G 421n), a definition that leaves fairly much open to interpretation; but although there might be a host of problems concerning this notion, I would say that the main issue here is this: what kind of level are maxims supposed to be located at? Are they to be identified with principled counterparts to highly specific intentions or with

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general underlying principles by which, as Onora O’Neill has put it,15 ‘the agent orchestrates his numerous more specific intentions’? Or are we supposed to think of them as being capable of having different degrees of generality and being situated in a hierarchy of maxims, ranging from the specific intentions underlying concrete actions to the fundamental disposition of one’s character? Of course, there is no room here for any extensive discussion of this matter; but it must also be remembered that before even attempting to approach it, one should be clear about what one is after: is it to ascertain ‘what Kant really meant’ or is it to elaborate a reasonable Kantian position? This work falls squarely within the latter category – even if it is still very interesting to try to understand what such a brilliant Kantian as Kant himself had to say. Accordingly, without going into the matter too far, I would like to briefly comment on some of the things that might be said for and against the various stances on maxims as interpretations of how Kant conceived of them. If we begin with the narrow interpretation, it would seem that most of Kant’s concrete examples are of a kind that fits with it: we are faced with an agent contemplating a certain course of action and then asked to consider a generalized counterpart to the specific intention that would underlie such behavior. At the same time, if we take this seriously, it would seem that we would get a test that is extremely sensitive to the way that the maxim under consideration is formulated. This is not the problem that with enough ingenuity an agent can always formulate a universalizable maxim for the action that he wants to do (this kind of creative freedom is not available to the agent, the maxim to be considered is the one he actually is about to act on16). Rather the problem is this: there are many concrete courses of action that we would commonsensically regard as instantiating the same type of action and as such they share in the moral quality of this action-type. But if different agents understand their behavior slightly differently, then it might very well be the case that in some such situations the action in question would be acceptable on account of the underlying maxim passing the test, while in others it would be unacceptable since the underlying maxim is not universalizable. This is certainly a result that one might embrace, perhaps even applaud on account of its 15 ‘Kant after Virtue’ in Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 151. This is a text where O’Neill is interpreting Kant; she has however since then also elaborated her own version of Kantian ethics and it is already from the outset framed in terms of basic principles rather than maxims, see her Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 16 This point is made persuasively by Onora O’Neill (Nell) in Acting on Principle: An Essay on Kantian Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), Chapter 3.

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sensitivity to the particular circumstances of concrete actions, but it does not accord well with common sense and it is difficult to see that it is a result that Kant himself would embrace. After, all the FUL is formulated in a work that is supposed to lay the ground for a coming metaphysics of morals, a systematic catalogue of the duties that are incumbent on us as moral agents. If the FUL is really to be understood as establishing a form of particularist morality then it is difficult to see why Kant envisaged such a metaphysics of morals at all (or, indeed, why he went on to produce one). There is also an additional worry that is related to the above, namely that with this interpretation the number of occasions that are open to the universalizability test becomes immense; and with this comes the possibility that there will exist many maxims that we intuitively find quite acceptable, perhaps even praiseworthy, but that do not pass the test. This is a perennial problem for any form of Kantian ethics that does not simply abandon the ideal of universalizability in favor of talk about rights or other notions; anti-Kantians of all ages have relished in putting forwards shrewdly constructed puzzle maxims that together with the FUL make behavior that is obviously morally innocent into something forbidden (or behavior that is obviously wrong into something acceptable). If we move on to the broad interpretation, this is probably not one that strikes the reader quite as easily, but there are still a few things that can be said in favor of it. As already pointed out, it would seem to result in a role for the test that lies closer to what Kant is after. For even if the Kant of the Groundwork at times sounds as if he is interested in providing us with a Big Principle that we are supposed to consult in everyday life, it is striking that when he moves on to write the work that Groundwork is supposed to lay the ground for, namely the Metaphysics of Morals, what he seems interested in is actually to say something general about the way that we should behave in a number of important spheres of human activity.17 Yet, while the broad interpretation would leave us with a more manageable test, it does face a few difficulties. The most obvious one is of course that Kant’s examples tend to be much more situational than they should be if this line of interpretation were correct; but the most significant philosophical problem is probably that if we want to restrict the notion of maxims, we would like some principled ground for drawing the necessary

17 It is also striking to what extent Kant already knows what he wants to say about these different matters and how haphazardly he uses his moral theory in underpinning what he already is certain of – but this is perhaps something that one should not be too surprised by given that he has so clearly professed his belief that we already know what to do; the snippets of theory present in this later work can thus be seen rather as ways of hammering in what we already, perhaps sometimes reluctantly, know in our hearts.

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distinction between maxims and principled counterparts to our specific intentions. Clearly, no such ground exists in Kant and while O’Neill certainly points to a class of principles that we can recognize ourselves as having, more is needed. While many of our specific intentions are perhaps contextual in a way that allows us to say that they are orchestrated by more general principles, many other specific intentions have a principled nature in the sense that they by themselves represent what we find best to do in that kind of circumstances. This same kind of difficulty will plague all variants of the broad interpretation or, indeed, all attempts to formulate a Kantian ethics that makes use of something like the FUL and try to rely on a broad view of what it is to be tested in terms of universalizability. Given the above difficulties there is perhaps one alternative interpretation that naturally suggests itself, namely a hierarchical interpretation. Henry Allison is a representative of this view.18 We could then accept that there are broad maxims, which might perhaps even form a suitable subject matter for a metaphysics of morals, and we could do so in a way that does not require us to make artificial distinctions since we can simply accept that generality comes in different degrees, and thus we do not need to draw any strict distinctions establishing differences in kind. We could also make sense of Kant’s choice of examples: these refer to the level of narrow maxims, which are also supposed to be eligible for the test. The best of both worlds? Aside from the exegetical problem that if this really was what Kant intended he could certainly have made it somewhat more clear, the risk here would seem to be that we end up with a theory that suffers the drawbacks of both the narrow and the broad interpretation. We get the problem with different maxims underlying what we commonsensically regard as the same kind of action and we get the problem with the immense number of maxims (even more so since on this view there are even more maxims to be considered). Additionally, if the notion of a hierarchy is to have any substance, then can we really escape the burden of providing some principled ground for the way that such hierarchies are divided into levels? It would seem that, whichever view we take, there are no shortcuts here. We need to do philosophical work before we get a manageable role for the FUL to play. And while exegetical concerns are not altogether beside the point, they do still play a secondary role in the kind of investigation pursued here; thus it would seem that we should move on to more general concerns in order to settle the question of how the universalizability test should be understood to have a place in our lives. In order to do this, I would like to situate this question within the context of a debate that has been going on for the last few decades concerning

18 Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chapter 5.

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the role of moral principles, or even moral theory, in our lives. If there is a role which they are properly, and for reasons independent of the Kantian enterprise as such, seen as having, then it would seem that if we wish to develop a tenable form of Kantian ethics we should choose the kind of understanding of maxims that fits with this picture and then do the required philosophical work of making it more precise.

6.4 Principles and Judgments

Before proceeding, let me begin with a clarification: when I write about moral theories, what I have in mind are theories that say something about how we ought to act. Such theories normally consist in a number of bridge principles that link the empirical and the normative. Thus, a typical moral principle would name an empirical property and attach a normative significance to it. It is important to note that moral theories in this sense need not strive to radically purify or even replace common sense morality, nor need they aim at making our lives as agents easier by allowing us to deliberate in new ways. They can of course aim at all these things and an important difference among moral theories is between what might be called algorithmic theories and framework theories. The former are attempts at providing a formula into which, given that we have an accurate description of the situation at hand, we can feed the relevant features and then get a recommendation about how to act. In such a theory, all applicable normative considerations are taken care of at the level of the theory. Framework theories, on the other hand, merely provide us with a set of principles with which our actions are to accord. Depending on the exact content of these lists, our behavior can be more or less regulated, but framework theories will not give us a definitive guide to acting well; and in cases where there is conflict between different principles, we will have to exercise our judgment and thus make a choice about weighting that is in itself not regulated by any principle. However, there is also another position, one that stands in contrast to both of these accounts, and which is at least not a moral theory in the strict sense, namely what can be called particularism or the anti-theoretical approach. According to it, morality cannot be codified in the way that friends of moral theorizing seem to believe; the role of judgment in our deliberations is too significant for moral theories to be anything but crude and ultimately misleading generalizations. I will now turn to discuss these three approaches. Since my own favored approach is framework theory, I will proceed in a dialectical fashion, arguing that both the algorithmic and the particularistic approaches are extreme positions that should be rejected, then turning to consider why at least a certain version of the framework approach can both provide a fruitful ground for a continued

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discussion over moral theory and help to show why moral theory can have at least a limited role to play in moral practice. (i) Algorithmic theories. According to adherents of this brand of theory, true morality can be completely codified. This means that we will be able to pack down everything of a normative character into a set of rules or, ideally, one supreme principle. The classic example is of course utilitarianism, but Kantian ethics can also be understood as providing an algorithm for morally acceptable action: simply feed the maxim of the action you are considering into the FUL and you will learn whether it would be acceptable or not to act on it. If we opt for the narrow interpretation of maxims, we will get a theory of this kind. It should be noted that there is still left a certain space for the role of judgment in both Kantian ethics, thus understood, and utilitarianism. The utilitarian will probably have to grant that we must rely on our experience as agents in order, for instance, to judge quantities of pleasure and pain – at least it is very difficult to see how there could be any set of rules for accomplishing this vital task. Moreover, the algorithmic Kantian will probably have to allow that we need judgment to determine just what the maxim is for the action that we are considering. None of these acts of judgment will however involve taking normative stances in any substantial sense of the word. This philosophical enterprise bent on articulating some kind of ethical algorithm has been criticized by a number of particularists. Many of these oppose standard moral theories mainly because of considerations pertaining to moral psychology, but others see additional reasons for rejecting the kind of approach that issues in the formulation of algorithmic theories. Among the latter, two of the more prominent are John McDowell19 and Martha Nussbaum.20 Of course, the works of both these and a number of similar-minded writers contain a number of important nuances that I have no possibility of doing justice to here and I will have to deal with their arguments somewhat summarily (although hopefully not too much so). The main point that can be made against algorithmic theories, and it is the point that McDowell and Nussbaum try to hammer in, is that such theories grossly underestimate the role played by context-sensitive judgment in moral decision-making. In Nussbaum’s

19 ‘Virtue and Reason’ in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). McDowell’s argument has been picked up by others, most notably Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), although Dancy’s arguments against moral theory are largely by example. 20 ‘The Discernment of Perception’ in Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

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case this is done by emphasizing the overwhelming complexity and heterogeneity of values that we encounter as agents, a complexity and heterogeneity that far outruns our philosophical conceptualizations and thus means that we will ultimately have to depend on our experience and imagination in order to come to grips with the situations we face. McDowell’s criticism is of a more principled nature, inspired as it is by Wittgensteinian considerations about rule-following. In fact, McDowell understands his arguments as resulting in an uncodifiability thesis about morality.21 If we begin with McDowell, there is a certain point about rule-following that simply must be conceded and which certainly rules out the possibility of there being a complete codification of moral action. It can probably be extracted from Wittgenstein, but at any rate, it has already been stated in a very clear way by Kant, when he considers how understanding is the faculty of rules and points out its dependence on judgment on account of the fact that

[i]f it sought to give general instructions how we are to subsume under these rules, that is, to distinguish whether something does or does not come under them, that could only be by means of another rule. This in turn, for the very reason that it is a rule, again demands guidance from judgment. And thus it appears that, though understanding is capable of being instructed, and of being equipped with rules, judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught. (CPR A133/B172)

Yet, while this is a valid point, and in some ways an important one, it is in this context still a trivial one. The adherent of an algorithmic theory can readily admit that his favored principle needs judgment in order to be applied (I have already given some examples of this need), but that does nothing to remove the fact that the principle states all that there is to know about what kinds of features that make actions right or wrong. It must also be pointed out here that the invocation of Wittgenstein that occurs in McDowell’s seminal ‘Virtue and Reason’ is not a move that can be made without presupposing a great deal about the moral reality in which we live. After all, the Wittgensteinian view on rule-following has to do with the regularities that exist in language, a human artifice, not in mind-independent reality. The meanings of words are socially constituted and this means that the standards of correct application are socially constituted as well. Given this, it is quite natural that rules of language cannot be understood as rails that stretch out towards any future application and which can simply be followed single-handedly by any individual language-user into new applications. If right and wrong in usage is socially determined then nothing definitive can be said about

21 Ibid., pp. 58-9.

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how a word should be applied in a new context until a relevant practice has developed within the actual language community for that particular context. Moreover, the meanings of words can of course change as the practices of the language community change. Thus, in the case of language, the would-be codifier is at best at an even pace with the language community and with all likelihood actually a few steps behind. If standards of right and wrong in morality were constituted as are standards of correct use of language, then McDowell would surely be right to insist on an uncodifiability thesis. Even if one where to encounter a society living like perfect utilitarians and was able to codify their moral practices into the Principle of Utility, then it would still be the case that they would dominate this codification rather than vice versa. Were they as a moral community to encounter new contexts of choice and in these contexts make judgments not subsumable under the Principle of Utility, then the codifiers would have no ground for saying that these people were now all behaving wrongly. The codification cannot lay out any definitive rails stretching beyond the present. But if this is to be relevant, it presupposes that moral standards of right and wrong are socially constituted. This is perhaps something that McDowell believes, although the exact meaning of his brand of moral realism is not one that there is room to attempt an articulation of here, but not all moral theorists would agree with this picture. Indeed, algorithmic theorists are probably the ones that would not agree with it. It might perhaps be retorted that then they owe us an account of why we should believe in the existence of the normative properties that they claim adhere to the empirical properties mentioned in their Big Principles. Yet, this hardly amounts to the kind of categorical rebuttal of algorithmic theories that one might have hoped for. If we turn to the kind of arguments presented by Nussbaum, it is probably the case that most adherents of algorithmic theory would agree with her and other similar-minded critics that the moral world of common sense is very complex. Where they depart company from these critics is in believing that this complexity is a surface phenomenon and that things really are much more simple at the fundamental level of which common sense morality is a distorted reflection, a mere shadow on the wall of the cave in which we currently reside. There is of course also the possibility that common sense morality is not even a bad reflection of true morality, that it is utterly misguided, but this is not a position that is, at least not as far as I am aware, embraced by any leading adherent of the algorithmic approach. Indeed, it would be a peculiar position to take, since it would mean that we would have to be able to reach True Morality through some other path than that of purifying common sense morality. Even consequentialists, who want to reject significant parts of ordinary morality, still usually start from some aspects of it and then try to show how those features of

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it that they want to reject are based on conceptual confusions or untenable distinctions. What critics like Nussbaum fear is of course that this project of purification removes far more than the stains: we are left with an impoverished picture, one where values are homogenized in order to make them all fit into the one Big Principle. One could also point to the obvious fact that while common sense morality is certainly bewilderingly complex if we try to codify it, most mature agents are still fairly good at applying it except in extreme or unusual situations. The problems only begin when we start to do moral philosophy. In the final analysis, there is hardly any knockdown argument available to either the adherents or opponents of algorithmic theory. Both sides run a considerable risk of simply begging the question against the other side. The adherents simply presuppose that the possibility of codification is not only an ideal of simplicity but also a criterion of validity, since those aspects of common sense morality that they tend to reject are precisely those that do not live up to the algorithmic ideal of codification. This problem can be seen in certain concrete debates: e.g. when consequentialists criticize the doing/allowing and intending/foreseeing distinctions22 they are to some extent criticizing common sense morality; but to an even greater extent they are simply criticizing those who try to conceptualize common sense morality in terms of these distinctions and it might thus be wondered whether they are really attacking common sense morality at all rather than simply a principled caricature of it. In everyday life, we rarely think in terms of such distinctions and we certainly do not see them as having the kind of stature that some non-consequentialist and consequentialist theorists tend to ascribe to them. On the other hand, the opponents of algorithmic theory at times seem to presuppose that just because there is such a great complexity and heterogeneity on the level of moral experience, this is something that the true picture of morality simply must accord with; given such a view it certainly suffices to give a few examples of things that the algorithmic theory under consideration does not, so to speak, do justice to. Yet, for the adherent this simply begs the question. In summing up, I would say that the mere possibility of particularism as a philosophical position on morality poses a serious threat to algorithmic theories. The basic problem of the algorithmic theorist is that he still relies on the validity of some aspects of common sense morality, and then tries to repudiate other aspects. This means that common sense morality is the default and that the argumentative burden lies on the algorithmic theorist. What particularism does is to present a fallback position for the adherent of common sense morality, one from which the things that the algorithmic theorist says are inconsistencies in it

22 For a good example, see Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

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can simply be reinterpreted as precisely the kind of things that tend to appear as peculiarities when you try to codify morality. Additionally, and unfortunately for the algorithmic theorists, the general intuitions that they build their theories on, e.g. that pleasure is good, are ones that we have less faith in as absolute truths than we have about some particular judgments that such theories might very well run counter to, e.g. that it is always wrong to torture infants solely for the sake of pleasure no matter how great the quantities of the latter are. (ii) Particularism. As already noted, this position is based in the idea that morality cannot be codified into any substantive set of rules: the role of judgment is too great. Yet, even if algorithmic theories tend to run counter to a host of commonsensical moral intuitions, this does not automatically mean that particularism is the way to go. Indeed, if we look at actual moral practice, it is obvious that rules and principles play an important role. When we speak to each other about moral matters, we tend to do so very much in terms of rules and principles. Of course, the fact that rules and principles have some role to play does not amount to an adequate defense of the project of moral theorizing, or of the view that morality can be codified. The particularist point is not that we act without reason, since we surely base our decisions on features in the situations we face, but that we do not carry a self-contained bag of reasons with us into each new situation and simply respond to those of these reasons that happen to be activated by features in the situation. Rather, in the situation at hand certain things strike us as salient features that demand certain ways of acting from us; and although there might be vague generalizations that can be made about the kinds of features that tend to strike us in certain ways, these generalizations are always tracking our individual judgments rather than vice versa. How does one argue against particularism? Just as was the case with algorithmic theory, any substantial argument will probably run the risk of simply begging the question. There is however one aspect of particularism, at least as it has been formulated by Anglophone philosophers, that must be regarded as questionable and which it actually shares with precisely those theories that particularists tend to oppose so strongly. Rather than being diametrically opposed, both moral theorists and anti-theorists in the Anglophone tradition tend to share one key feature, namely what might be called methodological individualism. However much philosophers in this tradition of thought might speak well about the value of friendship and of being situated in a flourishing community, it is still a fact about them that when it comes to providing a picture of moral thought and decision-making, matters still boil down to the individual agent who is able to single-handedly, armed with either his moral algorithm or his practical wisdom, pronounce what is to be done. There are certainly

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philosophers who deviate from this, discourse ethicists like Habermas being a good example,23 but they have only a peripheral place in the Anglophone debate on the role of rules and principles. And while there are ethical contract theorists like David Gauthier24 and Thomas Scanlon, the sociality involved in their respective theories is of an ideal character: it is an imagined sociality of the individual subject (although it should be acknowledged that Scanlon is probably the single philosopher, next to Kant, that the account of morality given here draws most of its inspiration from). Of course, the Wittgensteinian element in writers like McDowell points away from methodological individualism, but in McDowell the break with the tradition is not as clean as it should be since an Aristotelian valorization of the powers of moral divination of the virtuous person is grafted to the Wittgensteinian parts. In this mainstream tradition, theorists and anti-theorists alike all envisage a state of being of the individual agent where she has reached a point of full insight: in the case of algorithmic theories it is when she has realized the fundamental truth about morality and in the case of particularists it is usually when she has cultivated herself into possessing the virtues and practical wisdom. Ordinary agents might perhaps manage without either, but when we confront difficult moral problems, the answers that we are given are simple and straightforward: consult the Big Principle (in the case of algorithmic theorists) or consult the virtuous and practically wise person (in the case of particularists). In reality, moral decisions are however something we make as social beings, and not just in the sense that our decisions influence the welfare of our fellow human beings, but also because in making moral decisions we are taking up stances in a space of reasons that we share with them. This can be seen in what is one of the most important, and yet so often neglected, features of moral life, namely the way that we question the behavior of others. Too many moral philosophers reason as if the only difficulty there is to being a moral agent is to be able to decide what to do, when perhaps the greatest difficulty that we face is what we should say to others about the way we behave. Even if, in a concrete situation, they do not actually question us, we still carry with us the awareness that what we do is something that is open to questioning and we deliberate and decide in the light of this.

23 See Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) and Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). Habermas has a strong element of ideality in his theory, but the procedure of legitimating norms that he advocates is still one that in the final analysis presupposes actual ethico-political argument by an actual community working its way towards an actual consensus. 24 Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

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With this in mind it becomes easy to see why moral rules and principles play a role that goes beyond that of a supporting stick for the morally infirm (such as young people in the midst of being brought up or other non-virtuous people unable to simply see what is right and wrong), the general is a necessary aspect of moral argument and the impulse to frame one’s decisions in generalizable terms should thus not be seen as a sign of moral immaturity but as an expression of how one takes seriously the way in which one’s decisions are open to being questioned by others; and the impulse towards moral theory can be understood as a quite natural extension of this recognition. Of course, this is a movement towards generalization that starts form the bottom and moves upwards in abstractness whereas algorithmic theories have a top-down structure that can hardly be seen as sound expression of this inherent tendency in actual moral practice towards theory – but luckily there are other ways of doing moral theory than the algorithmic approach. (iii) Framework theories. The idea here is that morality can be codified into substantive rules or principles, but that there is still a very real role to be played by normative judgment. One way in which this can be understood is that while it is possible to codify the considerations that play a role in moral decision-making, i.e. to list those features which can function as moral reasons for or against doing something, it is not possible to provide any fully explicable procedure of how these features are to be weighed together. Although we can perhaps say a few general things about the importance of certain features relative certain others, e.g. that killing is a more serious wrong than stealing, our all-things-considered judgments about what to do can in the end only by guided by our principles, not determined by them. For a good example of a standard framework theory one can turn to W. D. Ross, who in The Right and the Good provides us with a list of six kinds of prima facie duties,25 but no instructions about how, more exactly, we are to go about in deciding when we are faced with a clash between two or more prima facie duties. Not that he neglects the problem; it is just that he leaves it to the intuitive powers of the individual agent to resolve moral conflicts. Ross is of course only an example, though still an instructive one. As we can see, he too belongs to the tradition of methodological individualism. That morality is a matter for us

25 The list contains the following types of duty: (i) those resting on one’s previous acts, (a) duties of fidelity and (b) duties of reparation, (ii) duties of gratitude, (iii) duties of justice, (iv) duties of beneficence, (v) duties of self-improvement, and (vi) duties of non-maleficence, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 21. Ross does not claim completeness or finality for this list, although it obviously represents his best effort to be exhaustive.

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primarily because we are social beings, and that we deliberate and decide about what to do in the light of what we are to be able to say to those who question us, is something that does not gain any recognition in the theory provided by Ross. Nevertheless, while this is true about Ross, it would not seem to be a feature that must characterize framework theories. In fact, such moral philosophers like Habermas and Scanlon, who both recognize the importance of the social element, still provide approaches that are probably best understood as falling within the category of framework theories; and among the three stances considered in this section it would still seem that framework theory provides us with our best hope of doing justice to this social element. If we continue with Ross for a little while, there is an additional problem that should be considered, namely that the kind of theory represented by him can be criticized not just because there is something unreasoned about those intuitive acts that resolve moral conflicts, but also because there is something unreasoned about the items on his list of duties as well. By just providing a list of types of action that are duties, albeit only prima facie so, he leaves us somewhat in the lurch on just why we should care about these specific types of action. If we compare the archetypal algorithmic theory, namely utilitarianism, with Ross, then it is often noted that the two fall on opposite sides of the teleology/deontology distinction as well. And though an algorithmic theory need not be teleological (nor vice versa), it is difficult to see how at least simple framework theories can be anything but deontological and it should therefore not be surprising if they are vulnerable to a line of criticism that has been formulated against deontological theories, namely that they incite a form of blind rule worship in agents.26 This was in fact a criticism that was leveled against deontological theories already when J. H. Muirhead formulated a proto-version of the distinction that he was later to articulate as an opposition between teleology and deontology.27 Muirhead’s complaint was that deontological theories make the observance of moral rules unintelligible because they do not provide us with any point in the light of which such rules makes sense. The problem is not one easily evaded by the deontologist since if he provides such a point, for instance by arguing that the observance of these rules tends to realize certain values, then he has in effect abandoned his deontology for teleology, or his framework theory for a sophisticated algorithmic one. What we would like is some form of sophisticated framework theory that provides us with a point in the light of which the observance of the framework rules becomes intelligible, but which does not

26 Cf. J. J. C. Smart, ‘An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics’ in J. J. C. Smart & Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For & Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 6. 27 The Elements of Ethics, 3rd Ed. (London: John Murray, 1910), Book II, Chapter II.

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accomplish this by actually providing us with some Big Principle that in effect replaces the framework. Now, it will probably come as no surprise that I would like to suggest that Kantian ethics can be understood precisely as such a sophisticated framework theory. To begin with, if we take the broad view on maxims and are able to produce some form of list of basic principles through the FUL, it is clear that while such a framework theory involves an additional level compared with the model provided by Ross, it is not a level that effectively replaces the principles; what we get is rather a unified way of reaching those principles. More importantly, in the Kantian model we are also given a point with adhering to the system of principles, namely this: I am to adhere to the basic principles of morality because by doing this I become worthy of achieving the happiness that I pursue. Additionally, Kantian ethics provides a way of understanding the link between this point and the actual principles that I am to adhere to, and it does this by allowing us to see how the universalizability of my maxims, my basic principles, is precisely something that involves the kind of recognition of my fellow human beings that makes me worthy of happiness. Accordingly, while Muirhead and others are surely correct in claiming that there is something disturbing about a rule, principle, or law that is just handed to us as something simply to be obeyed, they take a too narrow view on what the point of obeying rules can be. Kantian ethics does not give us a point with our framework of principles in the sense that they are shown to be productive of something;28 rather it provides us with a spirit which these principles embody and that makes it intelligible why one owes them one’s allegiance. Now, it might perhaps be felt that this notion of the ‘spirit’ of a framework is a bit fuzzy, but given the role that it plays, it need not be any more than it is. It might also be noted that it is not a notion without precedent in Kant himself:

In every law, the action which it commands is conformable to the letter of the law, but the disposition from which the action proceeds is the spirit of the law; the action itself is the littera legis pragmaticae, the intention is the anima legis moralis. Pragmatic laws have no spirit; they demand no disposition, only actions. Moral laws, however, have a spirit; they demand disposition, and the action as such ought merely to be an expression of the disposition. To perform an action, therefore, without a good disposition is to comply with the letter of the law but not with its spirit. (LE 47)

28 Although in a weak sense Kantian ethics can perhaps be said to be a teleological theory since the point of the framework is understood in terms of realizing the value that consists in worthiness to be happy. Yet, it can also be said to be a deontological theory since it is not the actions recommended by it as such that are either productive or constitutive of the moral value that we hopefully realize by being a certain kind of agent.

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Given this distinction between the letter and the spirit of the law, we are also provided with an alternative way of understanding the relation between the three main formulations of the Categorical Imperative: The FUL give us the letter of the law, the FH gives us an expression of the spirit of the law, and the amalgam of the FKE gives us an image of the union of the two. Admittedly, this does not accord with what Kant would understand with ‘the good disposition’ that contains the spirit of the law, but if we understand morality as a response to the right of the other to question us (and the ideal of universalizability as a way of envisaging how a recognition of this right can be imbued in our behavior), then it is not at all unreasonable to say that what the FH amounts to is precisely an expression of the kind of mind-set that characterizes the morally good agent. Indeed, this might go some way towards explaining why it is that readers new to Kant often find the FH to be an immediately appealing formulation, while the FUL and the FKE are often seen as more difficult to evaluate; the reason is simply that the FH is a comparatively pure expression of the spirit that already underlies common sense morality and thus also an expression of the kind of spirit in accordance with which we ourselves act if we are already reasonably good agents. Thus, unlike Ross who simply throws us a set of duties to which we are to adhere, a sophisticated Kantian framework theory gives us a point with the set of basic principles and provides us with a spirit that encapsulates the kind of light in which we should see the world, the people who inhabit it, and the situations that we come to face.

6.5 Leading a Moral Life

Even if the argument in the preceding section is correct and Kantianism provides us with a sophisticated framework theory, would it still not simply fall into the tradition of methodological individualism that has been criticized above? When considering this question, it is important to remember that Kantian ethics is not intuitionist. In Ross, the methodological individualism is linked to a certain picture of moral reality, one where moral features on both the general and the particular level are something that we intuit (just how we do it is, of course, left unexplained); but if we take the basic moral principles in a Kantian framework theory, they are derived from the FUL, not from us simply ‘seeing’ that certain features ground prima facie duties. Moreover, if we move on to the question of what it is that will fill out the gaps left by the principles in the framework, the Categorical Imperative does not as such contain anything that determines how this should be done concretely. Had we adopted the narrow interpretation of maxims, we would have had a purely monological algorithmic theory; but while there is a monological element

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even in the kind of sophisticated framework version of Kantian ethics elaborated here (since the justification to the abstract Other that lies in the FUL is one which requires no actual participation or answer from the Other), it still remains to be determined in what way the gaps in the framework generated by the FUL is to be filled in. The suggestion I would like to make is that if we take seriously the spirit of the FH, understood as above, then we should also come to see that to rely solely on the FUL would be to pervert the very practices in relation to which the FUL stands as an abstract extension, namely our everyday practices of justifying ourselves to others. Indeed, one reason for adopting the broad interpretation is precisely that otherwise the FUL would in effect replace these practices; were we able to rely simply on it, we would not need to go through the dreary routine of real argument with real people – a philosopher’s dream, perhaps, but hardly a sound ideal for persons living in a world of real people rather than philosophical abstractions. Even if the FUL should not be taken too far, it does still have an obvious and legitimate role to play since, in actual practice, we cannot justify ourselves to all those others whom we affect with our behavior. Accordingly, the most attractive position would seem to be one that strikes a balance between these two modes of justification, the moral stance towards others thus having these two poles: on the one hand a general justification to the abstract Other of the basic principles according to which one leads one’s life, on the other hand the serious and involved participation in our local practices of justifying ourselves to concrete others through giving and taking reasons and being prepared to go where the argument leads us. Understood in this way, the Kantian approach does give due regard to the social dimension of morality while still not leaving everything to being simply a matter of actual moral argument. The adoption of the broad interpretation still leaves us with the problem of providing a principled ground for identifying maxims, but before proceeding with this question I would like to note that if we leave exegesis aside there is another way of understanding it. We can accept that maxims can be of different generality, and that even specific intentions have principled counterparts that can be called ‘maxims’, but still maintain that only a certain class of maxims are eligible for the FUL test. Since we, as beings of reason, are characterized precisely by the principled nature of our behavior this would seem to be a preferable alternative and what we should thus say is that with the exception of a few basic maxims, which still need to be identified in some way, our maxims generally form the basis of our actual justificatory interactions with each other. Indeed, it is this principled nature of our behavior that opens up the dimension of answerability to the concrete Other: if nothing, in terms of specific actions, of what we did in actual situations had a reach beyond the particular situation, it

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would be difficult to see how we could argue with each other about these matters. Now, we still have to provide some method for identifying the maxims that are eligible for the FUL test. It should be noted here that even if O’Neill’s suggestion, that maxims (in our case: eligible maxims) are underlying principles that orchestrate our specific intentions, could be developed in a satisfactory way, it still falls somewhat short of what we need in order to elaborate a framework theory proper. The reason is that even on this account it is very much up to the individual subject what will count as fundamental maxims and what will not; but if we are to understand Kantian ethics as a sophisticated framework theory, we would like to be able to at least roughly list the basic principles to which we should adhere, just as Kant gives us a rough list of our duties in the Metaphysics of Morals. Indeed, in this late work, Kant does not start with what goes on in the head of the individual agent, but rather goes through a number of spheres of human activity and says something about how we should regulate our behavior in each of these spheres. Accordingly, aside from the difference between broad and narrow approaches, there is be room for distinguishing between Kantian approaches that focus solely on the subjective side of action and ones that also consider the objective side in the sense of the general circumstances within which we act and from which we can ask the question of what maxims the agent is acting on with respect to them. The latter approach still views maxims as subjective principles of action, but when it comes to identifying just which behavioral patterns of the agent that are supposed to be considered in terms of maxims eligible for the universalizability test it proceeds from a division into areas of action independent of the mind-set of the individual agent. For instance, if we see sexuality as such a fundamental sphere of human activity, then it does not matter whether the individual agent regards it as important or not, or whether the agent has given much thought about her behavior in this area or not; what we do is rather to identify what maxim the agent is actually following in this area. This means that the status of these maxims as being fundamental is not due to the fact that they are seen as fundamental by the individual – they may or may not be, but it is not what determines their status as such. What we have is rather a number of theory-generated slots concerning certain matters and pertaining to which we are interested in seeing what the individual fills these slots with (maxims are still subjective principles of action). This also means that if we choose an abstract enough level for the division into areas within which we should consider the moral status of maxims, we will be able to say in advance, without going into particularities concerning concrete individual agents, roughly what the right kinds of maxims will look like. When

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we then turn to consider the individual agent we can simply check whether he accords with the list of principles that we have already reached. Indeed, if Kant’s method in the Metaphysics of Morals is viable, he does actually provide us with a rather longish, and somewhat prudish, list against which we can check our behavior.29 However, apart from the fact that the system of morals elaborated in that work seems to lie at a level where contingent features of the social space within which Kant was situated had a significant impact on the resulting list of duties, in choosing which spheres we should consider we must keep in mind that they should be constituted in a way that makes the FUL applicable to them. This is not the case with the areas considered by Kant in the Metaphysics of Morals and because of this, he is forced to resort mostly to rather questionable invocations of the FH. As argued above, the FH is surely a noble expression of the kind of spirit that the Kantian understanding of human agency and sociality is imbued with, but as a moral principle meant to derive substantive precepts about how we should behave, it is simply too weak. If we want to rely on the FUL instead, and we really do not have any choice in this matter, we should try to identify a set of areas where there is some vital sphere of activity the very existence of which is at stake if we consider the universalization of certain maxims. The suggestion I would like to make here is that the most reasonable level for us to focus on is that which has to do with the existential presuppositions of our mode of being as pursuers of happiness in a shared space of reasons. Since the idea advocated here is precisely that morality is a response to the fact that we share a common world within which we are to pursue our individual projects and that we necessarily limit our respective pursuits (and, of course, not just in the way that we can actually block the execution of them, but also in the sense that people have to take into account the possibility of someone blocking, or attempting to block, their pursuits), it seems to be a reasonable standard that we should not lead lives that are parasitical on others creating and maintaining the space of reasons within which we pursue our happiness. Now, the exact contents of such a list of presuppositions is a matter that could certainly be discussed at great length, requiring a space not available here, but there is still some value in offering at least a tentative list of items to consider. The primary object of interest here is the fragility of the project of pursuing one’s happiness in a shared space of reasons and the main mode in which this is manifested is in the fragility

29 In this work, Kant has two ways of structuring the system of morals that he delineates: the first is through a formal categorization according to types of rights and duties, e.g. ‘perfect duties to oneself’ (MM 421); the second is based in philosophical anthropology, e.g. ‘on defiling oneself by lust’ (MM 424). Naturally, it is in the latter case that the contingencies of his day, and of his personal attitudes, make themselves felt.

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of the space of reasons – not in the sense that there is any actual threat to it, since in real life there are few things that are as robust; but it is still robust in an almost eerie way. The reason is, of course, that the entities that make up a concrete space of reasons are socially constituted and thus exist because we believe them to exist and because we have a variety of attitudes and behavioral patterns with respect to them. These entities are robust since we are all so very firmly held in place by our integration into the plural subject that constitutes them, but they are still so very fragile since were this plural subject to dissolve, the entities in question would disappear into thin air. Naturally, this ‘threat’ is not anything we need to bother about in everyday life, but when we start to think about the universalization of certain behavioral patterns it becomes a very real threat indeed. Now, the two fundamental modes in which this fragility can be understood to exist is that certain behavioral patterns can strike, first, at the very individuals that make up the plural subject, and, second, at those patterns of interaction that weave them together as a plural subject. (1) Fragility due to human frailty

(a) Mortality: no matter how we conceive our conceptions of happiness we can be killed and thus prevented in realizing them.

(b) Vulnerability: even without being killed we might be harmed and, as a consequence, constrained or incapacitated from pursuing our projects

(c) Weakness: no matter how capable we are, we do still at times fall prey to accidents, diseases, etc. and become dependent on the help of others.

(2) Fragility due to the frailty of the social fabric

(a) Communication: the constitution of a space of reasons within which we can formulate a conception of happiness requires a functioning community of reasoning and thus a system of linguistic communication.

(b) Argument: although any human community complex enough for a space of reasons that allows us intelligibly to pursue happiness will have a variety of practices involving coercion, the existence of a community of reasoning still presupposes that the main mode of getting others to do what one would like them to do is through argument rather than coercion and manipulation.

(c) Maintenance: while we as individuals constitute our own conceptions of happiness, the materials from which we do so are still constituted socially and we are, accordingly, dependent on others doing their bit to create a flourishing social space in which we have the possibility to exercise our capacity for articulating and pursuing our conceptions of happiness.

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What I would like to suggest is that the kind of appropriate principles that can be formulated in correspondence to the areas listed above, principles which we should have internalized as maxims in accordance with which we act as individual agents, can also be understood to fall into two other categories. This second categorization corresponds to the two ways in which Kant argues that a given maxim can fail the universalizability test (G 424). The first, contradiction-in-conception, is a form of failure that is due to the impossibility of a state where the agent can act on the maxim while everyone else is also acting on the maxim. Lying is a very clear example of this: if lying was universalized,30 the whole institution of communication would break down and it would be impossible to lie. In a similar way, non-argumentative modes of influencing others, like manipulation and coercion, are such that they are parasitical on the existence of the argumentative mode: if universalized they would lead to the breakdown of the very practices which they presuppose as a background and, thus, such a state is inconceivable. With regard to killing and harming it is perhaps less obvious whether they fail the test as contradictions-in-conception, yet if we consider not some abstract and purely imaginary state of the world, but rather the way that the human life-world actually works, it is quite clear that if these patterns of behavior were prevalent, the human life-world would collapse and not just into some Hobbesian state-of-nature where human beings seem to be much like they are now, only leading shorter, nastier, poorer, and more brutish lives, but in a much more radical sense: there could not be enough of a sociality for there to be a space of reasons within which we could have such a thing as human agency at all – and without that we would not be the kind of beings that can be understood as acting on maxims: ergo, while there might perhaps not be a contradiction in conceiving of the state where everybody are killing or harming each other, there is a contradiction in conceiving of the state where the agent is acting on a maxim of killing or harming in a world where everyone is acting on maxims of killing or harming. If we turn to the two remaining items, I would say that they are examples of the other manner, contradiction-in-the-will, in which maxims can fail the universalizability test. The idea here is that while it is possible to conceive of the state where the agent is acting on such maxims while everybody else are also 30 There is, of course, a problem here about what it means that maxims, especially at this level of abstraction, are universalized. One might perhaps think that we should imagine a world as close as possible to ours and then consider the maxims universalized in such a context, but since we are here dealing with such generic maxims this is hardly a feasible method. Instead, what we must do is to consider, in the abstract, what would be the case were such types of action, as are under consideration, to be prevalent as patterns of behavior (for whatever reasons that might be).

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doing it, the agent can nevertheless not will such a state and thus not act on the maxim as if he was making universal law through it. In both of the cases considered here the thing that puts limits on what we could will has to do with the fact that as agents we are bound to the pursuit of our happiness. If we had been independent of each other in the sense that the successes of our respective pursuits were something that we could be guaranteed, this would not have constrained us; but as is quite evident, this is not the case. We are weak in the sense that we are exposed to a number of risks, like diseases, natural disasters, and accidents. Not that they beset us on a daily basis but we do all fall prey to such unfortunate contingencies at a variety of times throughout our lives and when we do so, we need the help of others to cope. Given this fact about our existence we cannot will a state of the world where there is a universal disinterest in how one’s fellow human beings fare.31 This is not to say that we cannot will a world where everyone is primarily pursuing their own happiness, just that we cannot will a world where people do not help each other in times of need or distress. If we turn to the last of the items above, (2c), it is quite clear that we can will a state where everyone is not striving their utmost to support and enrich the social space within which they live. But if we consider the state that would follow from a general disregard for the impact of our behavior on the social fabric, then we must conclude that such a world would be a very much impoverished place to live in; there might still be a space of reasons within which agency would be meaningful, but it would be a contracted space within which we could not in any substantive way exercise our agency in conceiving our happiness; thus it is a state which we hardly can be understood as able to will. Kant’s view is that these two ways of failing the test gives us two kinds of duties, perfect and imperfect ones. The former are based in a contradiction-in-conception and are stricter, while the latter are based in a contradiction-in-will and are looser. One way of understanding this distinction is that whereas the perfect duties involve certain types of action as being ruled out, imperfect duties involve certain positive ends that we are to embrace, but the adherence to which leaves us a certain room for choosing and acting on ways of fulfilling these ends.32 Thus, for instance, that there is a perfect duty not to kill means that we 31 There is certainly a similarity between (1a-b) and (1c), but there is also good reason why they should be understood as significantly different. Patterns of behavior that run into problems having to do with (a) and (b), i.e. maxims of killing and harming, would create a state of enmity that would destroy the possibility of the existence of a space of reasons as such, the problem that can arise with respect to (c) is that certain patterns of behavior would create a state of disinterest that would destroy the possibility of the existence of a flourishing space of reasons. 32 For a good discussion of this distinction, see Marcia Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

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can know when looking at a specific action that it would be wrong of the agent to do it on account of it being an act of killing. And that the duty of beneficence is imperfect means that we cannot always know just from the fact that an agent can help whether it would be wrong of the agent not to help. What is required of the agent is that she embraces this end in a general way and if it is to be meaningful to deem that this is the case a certain number of specific acts of beneficence are clearly required (it might even be that some instances of need represent such overwhelming emergencies that failure to assist in a single one of them must mean that one has not truly embraced this end, but such cases are certainly very rare); but the agent has some leeway in choosing the exact ways in which she helps others. As is probably already evident, I favor a somewhat conceptually leaner Kantianism than that of Kant himself and I see no need to use the notion of ‘duty’ (especially since it is a somewhat outmoded notion anyway), but the distinction that exists in Kant is still valid and we can thus distinguish between two different kinds of principles to which a human agent should adhere and we can also arrange the principles, corresponding to the six areas delineated above, according to this additional distinction: Principles of Means (1) Not to kill (2) Not to harm (3) Not to lie (4) Not to use non-argumentative modes of persuasion Principles of Ends (5) To help others in times of need or distress (6) To support and enrich the social space within which one lives Together these six principles constitute the core involved in leading a moral life.33 Unlike the list of duties provided by Kant in the Metaphysics of Morals, this list is abstract enough to allow for those cultural variations which are a necessary consequence of the fact that the space of reasons within which one lives is always a formation that builds on a host of historical contingencies; but they also

33 It might perhaps be felt that there are some glaring omissions on this list, such as the obligation not to steal or the obligation to keep promises. Nevertheless, I would say that these are acts that presuppose specific cultural contexts in which practices concerning promises and property have evolved. If we happen to live under such circumstances, then to steal or break promises will however fall under several of the items on the above list, e.g. (2), (3) and (6).

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form a core in the sense that their content is not merely a matter of actual social constitution; rather they are presuppositions of the kind of social constitution that we are involved in as agents. Thus, while most reasons we act on have their basis in arrangements that are in a deep sense arbitrary, these principles are not. They are not grounded in reason in the sense that they can be derived from reason; they are what must be the case if human beings are to be realized as beings of reason and to exercise the kind of agency that is grounded in reason. It should also be noted that even if the FUL is capable of generating this framework of principles according to which we are to lead our lives, it has nothing to say about most of our concrete moral actions. It gives us nothing with which we can resolve moral conflicts or choose the best action in situations where we have many good actions open to us. Nevertheless, the approach developed here contains at least two components that help to flesh out the skeletal framework generated by the FUL. (i) Social standards and ideals. It is quite clear that morality as a system contains a vast amount of very specific and concrete precepts. Many of these are rules the exact content of which is wholly arbitrary, the point of them being rather that if we all act on them, social life runs a little smoother. Some precepts might perhaps even be called mere rules of etiquette, although etiquette is rarely anything ‘mere’ since in its fundamentals it concerns politeness and respect for others. And since the basic principles give us reason to adhere to social standards (at least in cases where they are not morally problematic), we can legitimately say that, on the level of specific actions, the framework here supports a modest relativism. On this level of deliberating and arguing, we are to draw on our local resources of reasoning and understanding rather than any application of a formal test. Thus, to act according to the rule ‘give gifts, but accept no gifts in return’ is not anything that is wrong on account of being non-universalizable; rather it is a dubious piece of behavior since it falls out of line with the customs of gift-giving that are prevalent in our social setting and it is wrong not to care about the practices and institutions that build up and enrich the social space that we inhabit. Of course, obedience to custom is only a guiding principle since by themselves these customs have no absolute authority over us and if we think that they curtail the flourishing of our social space or, even worse, that they violate the integrity of some people, then we have reason to go against them. Among our social standards, there is also a set of important features that might be called standards of arbitration. These are hardly ever explicitly articulated, but it is nevertheless the case that we do tend to agree about what the resolution should roughly look like in most conflicts that can be understood as conflicts between the basic principles. Since the above principles are derived from a

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formal test that can only distinguish between the universalizable and the non-universalizable, there is nothing in them that suggests the kind of weight they should be accorded in concrete situations. This is something we will have to develop local practices for handling (and we have already done so). On the approach suggested here, this matter of weighting is thus not anything that the theory should be expected to resolve. The theory only says something about the parameters which any social space should accord with, but within these parameters it is quite possible to have a number of different social spaces and one way in which their respective structures might differ is that they can embody different orders of priority within the set of basic principles – not that any of them can be regarded as unimportant, but which of them is regarded as most important, and in which circumstances our compliance with them can be sacrificed in order to comply with some other of them, is a matter that can vary between different social settings. No matter what they look like, these standards of arbitration are still absolutely essential in our lives as moral agents: without them we would be like persons trying to find their way in the world with only a compass and no map. (ii) The spirit of the FH. Although social standards and ideals, especially in terms of standards of arbitration, are very useful, Kantianism, when understood as a sophisticated framework theory, does also have the capacity to give us a sense not only of the letter of morality but also its spirit. In a way, the FH can be understood as a moral meta-principle that exists side by side with the principles derived from the FUL. If we are true to its spirit we will tend to seek solutions for moral quandaries through discussion with others rather than simply single-handedly making some divinatory act of judgment (à la neo-Aristotelianism) or some quasi-scientific act of moral calculation (à la consequentialism); the Kantian approach suggested here thus allows us to make room for the social element we found lacking in both algorithmic and particularistic theories. Finally, although it should not be exaggerated, this component also provides us with something that holds a certain critical potential. There might be many instances, and even patterns, of behavior that are generally accepted in the society within which one lives, patterns which are accepted by the majority of people, but which nevertheless are at odds with the spirit imbued in the FH. One example of such a practice might be a version of apartheid. Although it is disputable, it would probably be possible to argue that such a system could at least be compatible with the six principles, and even if it would certainly have an inherent tendency towards the development of a number of sub-practices that would involve violations of the six principles, what we at root feel so strongly against in such a system is that the spirit of it runs so grossly counter to the spirit

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of humanism – or to put it in a more Kantian way: it runs so grossly against the spirit imbued in the FH and in the ideal of the Kingdom of Ends. And while a pure Kingdom of Ends will never be implemented in this world, that does not stop it from being an ideal form of sociality to which the space of reasons in which we live hopefully will at least tend towards in its spirit.

6.6 Virtue and the Highest Good

When Onora O’Neill introduces the idea of understanding maxims as underlying principles, she does so in response to the criticisms directed against Kantian ethics by virtue theorists like Alasdair MacIntyre, and one of the key thoughts behind her suggestion is that if we take a suitably broad view on maxims, then the distance between Kantian ethics and virtue ethics is significantly lessened.34 If maxims are subjective principles of action and if we understand maxims as broad principles, or at least claim that there are some such maxims and that these broad maxims are the ones eligible for the FUL test, then to adhere to such principles will involve taking stances that one cannot reasonably be understood as having taken without having internalized the principles into the basic structure of the fabric of one’s character.35 On the Kantian theory of ethics outlined here, O’Neill’s suggestion is still very much to the point. (In fact, it is even more so than on her own account, since her approach still leaves open that maxims can have a fairly low degree of generality and concern matters with which we are not involved on a daily basis throughout our lives.) What we have, then, is not a theory to turn to when bewildered about what to do, in such cases we should rather turn to others whose judgment we hold in regard and discuss the matter with them, but a theory of what it means to be a moral person, namely to have internalized the letter of morality in terms of the basic principles and to be imbued with the spirit of morality, which involves taking seriously the need to justify ourselves to others both in the abstract and the concrete. To be such a person is to be in possession of virtue, in the Kantian sense, and while it is certainly possible for 34 In fact, in ‘Kant after Virtue’ she even contends that ‘Kant offers primarily an ethic of virtue rather than an ethic of rules’ (p. 154), although in the Postscript prepared for the re-publication of this essay in Constructions of Reason, she retracts this view, stating instead ‘that Kant offers an ethic of principles, rather than one specifically of virtues, and that principles can be variously embodied – both as virtues of individual characters or of institutions and also in practices and even in decision procedures’ (p. 162). 35 One might certainly conceive of persons who just happen to act in accordance with these principles but for other reasons, such as that it pays to do so, but then these persons are not acting on these moral principles but rather on some other principles.

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human beings to look at virtue as something wholly without value, from the perspective of the moral person, virtue is something that is of unconditioned value. Happiness does of course have its value too, but it is conditioned on the possession of virtue. Yet, why focus on the perspective of the moral person rather than that of the immoral one? Well, to begin with, everything that is of value is of value from some perspective; and if we have to choose whose perspective it is that we are to take as authoritative, the moral person or the immoral one, then why should we choose the latter? As argued in Chapter 5, we should seek no more than to makes sense of how the moral way of life is a reasonable one. As is well-known, Kant added to his account of the highest good both an idea of proportionality and an idea of endless progression towards virtue. It might perhaps be wondered whether something like that should not be done here as well; but if we look at virtue, especially as understood here, then I find the idea of virtue as coming in degrees highly dubious. At the very least, it would not seem to come in degrees on a continuous scale stretching from the utterly base to the morally perfect. To internalize the basic principles and to embrace the spirit of morality is something that we either have done or not. To be sure, some of us might adhere to these principles more strongly and be more imbued with the spirit of morality than others, so certain differences of degree are clearly possible, but there would still seem to be a certain ‘critical mass’ of moral fiber that must be ingrained in the fabric of one’s character before it is meaningful to speak about having virtue at all. Accordingly, virtue is something that we attain at a certain level of character development; and given that we have virtue, we can see ourselves as worthy of the happiness that might come to us through our pursuits. But since virtue and happiness are not anything that we possess in quantities that enable us to measure them against each other, the deal is this: if we have virtue, we are worthy of as much happiness as we are able and lucky enough to get. On this understanding, worthiness to be happy is thus not anything that comes in degrees: we either have it or we do not – which in this context simply means that from the perspective of justifying ourselves to the abstract Other we are able to either see ourselves as worthy of happiness or not. Within the moral sphere we might certainly still be able to become better persons, but to see this as an achievement worthy of striving towards is not something that can be based in a reasonable longing to be more worthy of happiness; the reason why the achievement of even greater virtue will appear in an attractive light to us is rather that part of being a virtuous person is to have reached far enough in one’s character development to have come to see virtue as something absolutely good – and once we have reached that point, then that is just how we see things.

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Now, finally, if we turn to consider our conceptions of happiness, then they usually contain both very ideal elements, things that are objects of hope rather than reasonable expectation, and more basic stuff. To achieve it all would be to achieve bliss, but we rarely do, and even if we do, we tend to revise our conceptions of happiness so that they come to include something else that we do not possess. Yet if we achieve enough of the basic constituents of our conceptions of happiness, the kind of constituents that are least variable to revision anyway, then we can reasonably deem ourselves happy. If we succeed in this while leading virtuous lives, then without having to wait for some otherworldly perfection that never comes, we have achieved the highest good. And that is a fine thing.

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