Impermissibility and Kantian Moral Worth

Samuel Kerstein argues that an asymmetry between moral worth and maxims prevents Kant from accepting a category of acts that are impermissible, but have moral worth. Kerstein contends that an act performed from the motive of duty should be considered as a candidate for moral worth, even if the action’s maxim turns out to be impermissible, since moral worth depends on the correct moral motivation of an act, rather than on the moral rightness of an act. I argue that Kant cannot consistently maintain that there are morally forbidden, though good, acts since one of the conditions of acting from the moral law should be that one has a true belief about what the moral law requires. My project, then, rejects the possibility of morally impermissible, worthy acts for Kant, and qualifies the conditions for moral worth Kerstein gives with an epistemological constraint on moral worth.     

Schizophrenia and Moral Responsibility: A Kantian Essay

In this paper, I give a Kantian answer to the question whether and why it would be inappropriate to blame people suffering from mental disorders that fall within the schizophrenia spectrum. I answer this question by reconstructing Kant’s account of mental disorder, in particular his explanation of psychotic symptoms. Kant explains these symptoms in terms of various types of cognitive impairment. I show that this explanation is plausible and discuss Kant’s claim that the unifying feature of the symptoms is the patient’s inability to enter into an exchange of reasons with others. After developing a Kantian Quality of Will Thesis, I analyze some real life cases. Firstly, I argue that delusional patients who are unable to enter into an exchange of epistemic reasons are exempted from doxastic rather than moral responsibility. They are part of the moral community and exonerated from moral blame only if their actions do not express a lack of good will. Secondly, I argue that disorganized patients who are unable to form intentions and to make plans are exempted from moral responsibility because they do not satisfy the conditions for agency.     

Kantian Constructivism and the Moral Problem

According to the standard objection, Kantian constructivism implicitly commits to value realism or fails to warrant objective validity of normative propositions. This paper argues that this objection gains some force from the special case of moral obligations. The case largely rests on the assumption that the moral domain is an eminent domain of special objects. But for constructivism there is no moral domain of objects prior to and independently of reasoning. The argument attempts to make some progress in the debate by defending a robust conception of construction, which names a distinctive view of practical reasoning as transformative.     

Moral Self-Knowledge in Kantian Ethics

Kant’s duty of self-knowledge demands that one know one’s heart—the quality of one’s will in relation to duty. Self-knowledge requires that an agent subvert feelings which fuel self-aggrandizing narratives and increase self-conceit; she must adopt the standpoint of the rational agent constrained by the requirements of reason in order to gain information about her moral constitution. This is not I argue, contra Nancy Sherman, in order to assess the moral goodness of her conduct. Insofar as sound moral practice requires moral self-knowledge and moral self-knowledge requires a theoretical commitment to a conception of the moral self, sound moral agency is for Kant crucially tied to theory. Kant plausibly holds that self-knowledge is a protection against moral confusion and self-deception. I conclude that although his account relies too heavily on the awareness of moral law to explain its connection to moral development, it is insightful and important in Kantian ethics.     

Kantian Moral Retributivism: Punishment,Suffering, and the Highest Good

Against the view of some contemporary Kantians who wish to downplay Kant's retributivist commitments, I argue that Kant's theory of practical of reason implies a retributive conception of punishment. I trace this view to Kant's distinction between morality and well‐being and his attempt to synthesize these two concerns in the idea of the highest good. Well‐being is morally valuable only insofar as it is proportional to virtue, and the suffering inflicted on wrongdoers as punishment for wrongdoing is morally good so long as it is proportional to the wrongdoing. According to Kantian retributivism, punishment is warranted as a means to promote proportionality between well‐being and virtue.     

The Kantian Moral Hazard Argument for religious fictionalism

In this paper I do three things. Firstly, I defend the view that in his most familiar arguments about morality and the theological postulates, the arguments which appeal to the epistemological doctrines of the first Critique, Kant is as much of a fictionalist as anybody not working explicitly with that conceptual apparatus could be: his notion of faith as subjectively and not objectively grounded is precisely what fictionalists are concerned with in their talk of nondoxastic attitudes. Secondly, I reconstruct a logically distinct argument to a fictionalist conclusion which I argue Kant also gives us, this time an argument to the conclusion that it is a good thing if our commitment to the existence of God is nondoxastic. And finally, I argue that this argument is of continuing interest, to Kantians and non-Kantians alike, not only because it raises interesting questions about the relation of morality to belief in God (which go in the opposite direction to most discussions, which focus on whether and to what extent belief in God can be an aid to morality), but also because this ‘Moral Hazard Argument’ seems to be available to religious realists and non-realists alike, thus suggesting that religious fictionalism is not by any means just an interesting version of religious non-realism.     

The Character of Temptation: Towards a More Plausible Kantian Moral Psychology

Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in the face of powerful inclinations to act immorally, and indeed that opposing inclinations only highlight the worth of the action. I argue that this conclusion rests on an implausibly mechanistic account of desires, and that many desires are constituted by tendencies to see certain features of one's circumstances as reasons to perform one or another action. I try to show that inclinations to violate moral requirements sometimes manifest a morally objectionable half-heartedness in one's commitment to those very requirements, and - by extension - to the values that undergird these requirements.     

Solidarity and Social Moral Rules

The value of solidarity, which is exemplified in noble groups like the Civil Rights Movement along with more mundane teams, families and marriages, is distinctive in part because people are in solidarity over, for or with regard to something, such as common sympathies, interests, values, etc. I use this special feature of solidarity to resolve a longstanding puzzle about enacted social moral rules, which is, aren’t these things just heuristics, rules of thumb or means of coordination that we ‘fetishize’ or ‘worship’ if we stubbornly insist on sticking to them when we can do more good by breaking them? I argue that when we are in a certain kind of solidarity with others, united by social moral rules that we have established among ourselves, the rules we have developed and maintain are a constitutive part of our solidary relationships with one another; and it is part of being in this sort of solidarity with our comrades that we are presumptively required to follow the social moral rules that join us together. Those in the Polish Revolution, for example, were bound by informally enforced rules about publicity, free speech and the use of violence, so following their own rules became a way of standing in a valuable sort of solidarity with one another. I explain why we can have non-instrumental reasons to follow the social moral rules that exist in our own society, improve our rules and even sometimes to break the otherwise good rules that help to unite us.     

Moral Rules,Moral Ideals,and Use-Inspired Research

Moral rules provide the baseline for ethics, proscribing unacceptable behavior; moral ideals inspire us to act in ways that improve the human condition. Whatever the moral ideals for pure research, science has a practical side so it is important to find a moral ideal to give guidance to more applied research. This article presents a moral ideal for use-inspired research based on Norman Care’s idea of shared-fate individualism This ideal reflects the observation that all human lives, both present and future are tightly coupled and, as a result, research projects should be chosen, where possible, with the goal of service to others. Together with the ideals of the habit of truth and the gift economy, shared-fate individualism provides the basis for a humane ethics of science.     

论元伦理学中的康德式建构主义

康德主义伦理学被怀疑论者看作一种心灵-独立的实在论,并因此遭到它的批评。实在论者则把康德主义伦理学作为一种心灵-独立的实在论加以辩护。科斯嘉承继并推进了罗尔斯所实现的康德主义的元伦理学转向,在回应对康德主义外在实在论批评和辩护的同时,提出了一种建构主义的程序实在论,并把它作为一种内在的实在论加以辩护,完成了道德实在论的内在转变。但是这种康德式建构主义却面临着这样一个困难,即它作为一种内在的实在论同时是一种非认知主义。从理论的融贯性来看,与这种康德式内在实在论相适合的应是一种康德式内在认知主义。     

Perspectives for Assessing Career Development

This article illustrates how the perspectives of field orientation, time frame, and goal setting influence the assessment of career development.     

The Moral Luck of Rules

The text reflects on the view of morality, according to which its central elements are rules that make a society efficient, bringing the greatest benefit. I show that rules represent a part of our “circumstantial luck,” and that their particularity often makes life more difficult. As we tend to internalise rules and interpret spontaneously the situations of our lives in their terms, we may be, in the cases of unfeasible rules, prone to view ourselves as failure. Generally, rule-like statements (including moral rules) more naturally serve as tools for reflection on our past (failures) than as guidelines for the future. The presence of rules in our lives thus calls for compassion towards those who have failed in terms of the rules that they acknowledge.     

A Kantian Moral Duty for the Soon-to-be Demented to Commit Suicide

It has been argued that, on Kantian grounds, pedophiles, rapists and murderers are morally obligated to take their own lives prior to committing a violent action that will end their moral agency. That is, to avoid destroying the agent's moral life by performing a morally suicidal action, the agent, while he still is a moral agent, should end his body's life. Although the cases of dementia and the morally reprehensible are vastly different, this Kantian interpretation might be useful in the debate on the permissibility of suicide for those facing dementia's effects. If moral agents have a duty to act as moral agents, then those who will lose their moral identity as moral agents have an obligation to themselves to end their physical lives prior to losing their dignity as persons.