A Direct Kantian Duty to Animals

Kant's view that we have only indirect duties to animals fails to capture the intuitive notion that wronging animals transgresses duties we owe to those animals. Here I argue that a suitably modified Kantianism can allow for direct duties to animals and, in particular, an imperfect duty to promote animal welfare without unduly compromising its core theoretical commitments, especially its commitments concerning the source and nature of our duties toward rational beings. The basis for such duties is that animal welfare, on my revised Kantian view, is neither a conditioned nor unconditioned good, but a final and nonderivative good that ought to be treated as an end‐in‐itself. However, this duty to promote animal welfare operates according to a broadly consequentialist logic that both accords well with our considered judgments about our duties to animals and explains differences between these duties and duties owed to rational agents.     

Cognitive Self‐Enhancement as a Duty to Oneself: A Kantian Perspective

Recently some bioethicists and neuroscientists have argued for an imperative of chemical cognitive enhancement. This imperative is usually based on consequentialist grounds. In this paper, the topic of cognitive self‐enhancement is discussed from a Kantian point of view in order to shed new light on the controversial debate. With Kant, it is an imperfect duty to oneself to strive for perfecting one's own natural and moral capacities beyond one's natural condition, but there is no duty to enhance others. A Kantian approach does not directly lead to a duty of chemical cognitive self‐enhancement, but it also does not clearly rule out that this type of enhancement can be an appropriate means to the end of self‐improvement. This paper shows the benefits of a Kantian view, which offers a consistent ideal of self‐perfection and teaches us a lesson about the crucial relevance of the attitude that underlies one's striving for cognitive self‐improvement: the lesson of treating oneself as an end in itself and not as mere means to the end of better output.     

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.     

Tarasoff and the Duty to Protect

Summary

The Tarasoff I and Tarasoff II cases were decided by the California Supreme Court in 1974 and 1976, respectively. These cases involved the murder of a young woman by her ex-boyfriend, who had been a patient at a University counseling center. The parents of the young woman sued, alleging negligence. Tarasoff I set forth a “duty to warn” on the part of psychotherapists. Upon rehearing in Tarasoff II, the decision was upheld but modified. The court ruled that when a therapist determines, or should have determined, that a patient presents a serious danger of violence to another, the therapist has a “duty to protect” that other person. In this article, we address subsequent cases that have arisen under the “duty to protect” doctrine, and analyze some of the legal issues that these cases have raised.     

Gordon Kaufman and the Kantian mystery

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

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.     

A Kantian solution to the problem of imperceptible differences

There are cases such as climate change where the cumulative effects of the actions of several agents lead to grave harm but where no individual agent can make a perceptible difference for the better or worse. According to Derek Parfit, dealing with such imperceptible difference cases requires substantial changes to the way we think about morality. In On What Matters, Parfit builds on Kantian Ethics to address the problem of imperceptible differences, but the transformation that Kant's theory undergoes in his hands is radical. I argue that Parfit's changes to Kant's theory are not only unnecessary but also detrimental to making sense of the ethical dimensions of action in collective contexts. Building on the notion of imperfect duties, I offer an alternative solution to the problem of imperceptible difference cases that remains closer to Kant's original theory and avoids the difficulties of Parfit's approach.     

Animality and Agency: A Kantian Approach to Abortion

This paper situates abortion in the context of women's duties to themselves. I argue that the fundamental Kantian requirement to respect oneself as a rational being, combined with Kant's view of our animal nature, form the basis for a view of pregnancy and abortion that focuses on women's agency and characters without diminishing the importance of their bodies and emotions. The Kantian view of abortion that emerges takes abortion to be morally problematic, but sometimes permissible, and sometimes even required.
After sketching Kant's account of duties to oneself, I discuss the challenges pregnancy poses to women's agency. I then argue that abortion is morally problematic because it is antagonistic to an important subset of morally useful emotions that we have self-regarding duties to protect and cultivate; thus, there is a rebuttable deliberative presumption against maxims of abortion for inclination-based ends. I close by considering objections.     

Muslim Governance and the Duty to Protect

In this response to Johnson, Oh reaffirms the scholarly vision of Kelsay and Twiss, elaborates upon Muslim perspectives on human rights, and questions the emphasis on violent humanitarian interventions as part of the Responsibility to Protect mandate. Oh suggests that, in light of the historical relationship between Muslim and non‐Muslim states and the aftermath of the second Iraq War, more consideration be given to the rebuilding of Muslim‐majority societies. Oh also highlights the concept of duty as a religiously based ideal to which governments of Muslim nations ought to be held.     

Freedom and poverty in the Kantian state

The coercive authority of the Kantian state is rationally grounded in the ideal of equal external freedom, which is realized when each individual can choose and act without being constrained by another's will. This ideal does not seem like it can justify state‐mandated economic redistribution. For if one is externally free just as long as one can choose and act without being constrained by another, then only direct slavery, serfdom, or other systems of overt control seem to threaten external freedom. Yet Kant endows the freedom‐based state with considerable powers of economic redistribution. I argue that recent commentary has misunderstood both Kant's account of why poverty is a form of freedom‐threatening dependence and the extent of the Kantian state's powers for remedying poverty. Criticizing Arthur Ripstein and the Kantianism of the “Toronto‐School,” I argue that the most salient notion of dependence at issue within the Kantian framework is not the direct control of the choice‐making capacities of another but asymmetrical influence in a power relationship. For Kant, poverty is fundamentally a problem of structural disempowerment.     

Kantian constructivism and the authority of others

I argue that Christine Korsgaard's Kantian constructivism cannot accommodate our obligations to others. Because she holds that all of our obligations are grounded in our obligating ourselves, she is committed to the view that our obligations to others are grounded in corresponding obligations to ourselves. Yet this conclusion is objectionable on substantive moral grounds. The problem is that she embraces an egocentric conception of authority, on which we originally have the authority to obligate ourselves whereas others only have the authority to obligate us because we grant it to them. The solution is to adopt a more thoroughly social conception of authority and autonomy.     

A Reply to Cholbi's 'Suicide Intervention and Non-Ideal Kantian Theory'

abstract    In his 'Suicide Intervention and Non-Ideal Kantian Theory' (2002), Michael J. Cholbi argues that nihilism and hopelessness are often motivating factors behind suicide, contrary to Immanuel Kant's prescribed motive of self-love. In light of this, Cholbi argues that certain paternalistic modes of intervention may not only be effective in preventing suicide, but are ultimately consistent with Kantian morality. This paper addresses certain perceived shortcomings in Cholbi's account of Kantian suicide intervention. Once the psychological complexities of the suicidal person are brought to bear, the suicidal person is found in many cases to be irrational at the time of her death. Because of this, rationalistic intervention strategies may prove ineffective, despite their being consistent with Kantian morality, and despite instances of suicide being non-ideal circumstances. Cholbi assumes throughout his article that suicidal human beings remain Kantian moral agents. However, because rationality represents a crucial criterion for Kantian moral agency, and because certain human beings who commit suicide are not rational, such human beings are not Kantian moral agents. Because Cholbi's intervention strategies are not applicable to (or effective towards) irrational suicidal people, his account is found incomplete.     

Autonomy and radical evil: a Kantian challenge to constitutivism

Properly understood, Kant’s moral philosophy is incompatible with constitutivism. According to the constitutivist, being subject to the moral law cannot be a matter of free choice, and failure to comply with it is to be understood as a deficiency in one’s integrity as an intentional agent. I reconstruct Kant’s arguments to the conclusion that immorality, moral evil, consists in choosing to give one’s unity as an intentional agent supremacy over the moral law, and that one’s being subject to the moral law must be one’s own free choice. And I explain how Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, according to which we cannot be subject to the moral law without actually being morally evil, protects this conclusion from entailing the denial of the unconditionally binding character of moral principles, which character constitutivists correctly identify as the central concern of Kant’s – or any – moral philosophy.