Reasons of love: an introduction

One of the main reasons for philosophers to have embraced Humean constructivism rather than Kantian constructivism is a negative one: they believe that in the end Kantian constructivism is an unstable position. Their idea is that the Kantian constructivist can either choose to hold on to the idea of categorical reasons for action but in that case she has to be prepared to commit to (robust) moral realism (which both Humean and Kantian constructivists reject) or alternatively, she might reject (robust) moral realism but in that case she has to give up on the idea of categoricity. The aim of this paper is to defend Kantian constructivism against Humean constructivism and more specifically against recent objections raised by Sharon Street. I will do so by arguing that Kantian constructivism follows from formal, normative commitments that pertain to instrumental reasoning that Humean constructivists like Sharon Street themselves accept. More specifically I will argue that categorical reasons for action follow from applying the principle of instrumental rationality to the first-person perspective of an agent, provided that there are certain necessary means for action in general. From this follows, I will argue, that Humean constructivists should either become Kantian constructivists or that they have to become sceptics about normativity.     

KANTIAN VALUE REALISM

Why should we be interested in Kant's ethical theory? One reason is that we find his views about our moral responsibilities appealing. Anyone who thinks that we should treat other people with respect, that we should not use them as a mere means in ways to which they could not possibly consent, will be attracted by a Kantian style of ethical theory. But according to recent supporters of Kant, the most distinctive and important feature of his ethical theory is not his claims about the particular ethical duties that we owe to each other, but his views about the nature of value. They argue that Kant has an account of the relationship between practical reason and value, known as “Kantian constructivism” that is far superior to the traditional “value realist” theory, and that it is because of this that we should accept his theory. ¹ 1 Korsgaard (1996a, 1996b, 2003 ).
It is now standard for both supporters and critics to claim that Kant's moral theory stands or falls with Kantian constructivism. ² 2 Gaut (1997 ), Regan (2002 ).
But this is a mistake. In this paper, I sketch a rival Kantian theory of value, which I call Kantian value realism. I argue that there is textual evidence that Kant himself accepted value realism rather than constructivism. Whilst my aim in this paper is to set out the theory clearly rather than to defend it, I will try to show that Kantian value realism is preferable to Kantian constructivism and that it is worthy of further study.     

The Problem of Obligation,the Finite Rational Will,and Kantian Value Realism

Abstract

Robert Stern's Understanding Moral Obligation is a remarkable achievement, representing an original reading of Kant's contribution to modern moral philosophy and the legacy he bequeathed to his later-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century successors in the German tradition. On Stern's interpretation, it was not the threat to autonomy posed by value realism, but the threat to autonomy posed by the obligatory nature of morality that led Kant to develop his critical moral theory grounded in the concept of the self-legislating moral agent. Accordingly, Stern contends that Kant was a moral realist of sorts, holding certain substantive views that are best characterized as realist commitments about value. In this paper, I raise two central objections to Stern's reading of Kant. The first objection concerns what Stern identifies as Kant's solution to the problem of moral obligation. Whereas Stern sees the distinction between the infinite will and the finite will as resolving the problem of moral obligation, I argue that this distinction merely explains why moral obligations necessarily take the form of imperatives for us imperfect human beings, but does not solve the deeper problem concerning the obligatory nature of morality—why we should take moral norms to be supremely authoritative laws that override all other norms based on our non-moral interests. The second objection addresses Stern's claim that Kantian autonomy is compatible with value realism. Although this is an idea with which many contemporary readers will be sympathetic, I suggest that the textual evidence actually weighs in favor of constructivism.     

Naïve Realism,Seeing Stars,and Perceiving the Past

It seems possible to see a star that no longer exists. Yet it also seems right to say that what no longer exists cannot be seen. We therefore face a puzzle, the traditional answer to which involves abandoning naïve realism in favour of a sense datum view. In this article, however, I offer a novel exploration of the puzzle within a naïve realist framework. As will emerge, the best option for naïve realists is to embrace an eternalist view of time, and claim that in the relevant case, one sees a still existent star‐stage located somewhere in the distant past.     

Merciful Justice

I offer a solution to an old puzzle about how God can be both just and merciful at the same time—a feat which seems required of God, but at the same time seems impossible since showing mercy involves being more lenient than justice demands. Inspired by two of Jesus’ parables and work by Feinberg, Johnson and Smart, I suggest that following a “principle of merciful justice”—that persons ought to receive what they deserve or better—delivers mercy and justice simultaneously, certainly in cases of distributions of goods, and even in cases of distribution of harms as well, if we can accept some qualifications.     

Three Paradigms of Scientific Realism: A Truthmaking Account

This paper investigates the nature of scientific realism. I begin by considering the anomalous fact that Bas van Fraassen's account of scientific realism is strikingly similar to Arthur Fine's account of scientific non-realism. To resolve this puzzle, I demonstrate how the two theorists understand the nature of truth and its connection to ontology, and how that informs their conception of the realism debate. I then argue that the debate is much better captured by the theory of truthmaking, and not by any particular theory of truth. To be a scientific realist is to adopt a realism-relevant account of what makes true the scientific theories one accepts. The truthmaking approach restores realism's metaphysical core—distancing itself from linguistic conceptions of the debate—and thereby offers a better characterization of what is at stake in the question of scientific realism.     

Frege's Puzzle for Perception

According to an influential variety of the representational view of perceptual experience—the singular content view—the contents of perceptual experiences include singular propositions partly composed of the particular physical object(s) a given experience is about or of. The singular content view faces well‐known difficulties accommodating hallucinations; I maintain that there is also an analogue of Frege's puzzle that poses a significant problem for this view. In fact, I believe that this puzzle presents difficulties for the theory that are unique to perception in that strategies that have been developed to respond to Frege's puzzle in the case of belief cannot be employed successfully in the case of perception. Ultimately, I maintain that this perceptual analogue of Frege's puzzle provides a compelling reason to reject the singular content view of perceptual experience.     

Striking coincidences: How realists should reason about them

Many metaethicists assume that our normative judgments are both by and large true, and the product of causal forces. In other words, many metaethicists assume that the set of normative judgments that causal forces have led us to make largely coincides with the set of true normative judgments. How should we explain this coincidence? This is what Sharon Street (2006) calls the practical/theoretical puzzle. Some metaethicists can easily solve this puzzle, but not all of them can, Street argues; she takes the puzzle to constitute a specific challenge for normative realism. In this article I elucidate Street’s puzzle and outline possible solutions to it, framed in terms of a general strategy for reasoning about coincidences. I argue that the success of Street’s challenge crucially depends on how we set the ‘reference class’ of normative judgments that we could have endorsed, assuming realism. I conclude that while the practical/theoretical puzzle falls short of posing a general challenge for normative realism, it can be successful as a selective challenge for specific realist views.     

THE MORALITY,POLITICS, AND IRONY OF WAR: Recovering Reinhold Niebuhr's Ethical Realism

The American experience of war is ironic. That is, there is often an intimate and unexamined relationship between seemingly contrary elements in war such as morality and politics. This article argues that without understanding such irony, we are unlikely to reflect in morally comprehensive ways on past, present, or future wars. Traditional schools of thought, however, such as moralism and political realism, reinforce these apparent contradictions. I propose, then, an alternative—“ethical realism” as informed by Reinhold Niebuhr—that better explains the irony of war. Through an ethical realist examination of the U.S. Civil War, World War II, and the Iraq War, I consider how American political interests have been inextricably linked with deep moral concerns. Ethical realism charts a middle path that ennobles traditional realpolitik while eschewing certain perfectionist tendencies of moralism. Ethical realism provides a conceptual framework for evaluating these other frameworks—a distinct form of moral‐political deliberation about war.     

Realizing the Good: Hegel's Critique of Kantian Morality

Although the best‐known Hegelian objection against Kant's moral philosophy is the charge that the categorical imperative is an ‘empty formalism’, Hegel's criticisms also include what we might call the realizability objection. Tentatively stated, the realizability objection says that within the sphere of Kantian morality, the good remains an unrealizable ‘ought’ – in other words, the Kantian moral ‘ought’ can never become an ‘is’. In this paper, I attempt to come to grips with this objection in two steps. In the first section of the paper, I provide an initial reading of the objection, according to which Hegel agrees with Kant's formulation of the realizability problem but disagrees with the specific Kantian solution, namely, with the Kantian idea of the highest good and the doctrine of the postulates. In the second section, I go on to argue that this reading is potentially too superficial and offer a more far‐reaching interpretation whereby Hegel is ultimately targeting fundamental distinctions (between, for instance, reason and sensibility) of Kant's moral theory. I end by employing these more far‐reaching results of Hegel's objection to sketch some features of Hegel's alternative ethical view.     

On Art and Intention

The author discusses a puzzle about the place of intention in art, a puzzle first articulated by Richard Wollheim in his well-known lecture 'On Drawing an Object'. The puzzle arises if we try to hold jointly three commonly-held claims, viz. (1) Art is intentional; (2) The artist, in making a work of art, needs to observe what he has done, in order to know what he has done; (3) A necessary condition of intentional action is that when an agent acts intentionally then he knows what he is (intentionally) doing without observation, or any need for it. Prima facie it would appear that we cannot hold all these claims together.
The author spells out the problem, discusses Wollheim's own solution to it (which he rejects) and seeks to dispel the puzzle by closer attention to intention and action in relation to artistic production.     

From Kant to Post-Kantian Idealism: German Idealism: Paul Franks

German idealists regard Spinozism as both the realism that outflanks Kant's idealism and the source of the conception of systematicity with which to fortify idealism. But they offer little argument for this view. To fill the gap, I reconstruct arguments that could underlie Jacobi's and Pistorius's tentative but influential suggestions that Kant is or should be a Spinozist. Kant is indeed a monist about phenomena, but, unlike Spinoza, a pluralist about noumena. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the Third Antinomy can be solved by a more thoroughgoing Spinozistic monism. The resulting Spinozism outflanks Kant by acknowledging Jacobi's charge that philosophy annihilates immediacy and individuality, whereas Kant's commitment to things in themselves can seem a half-hearted attempt to avoid the charge. However, the German idealist contention is that only a synthesis of such a Spinozism with Kantian idealism can retrieve immediacy and individuality, thus overcoming nihilism.     

PEIRCE'S "ARCHITECTURE OF THEORIES" AND THE PROBLEM OF PRAGMATISM

The paper begins as a response to Tom Rockmore's thesis that contemporary pragmatism is a healthy “confusion” of disparate views. While Rockmore sees the need of some of today's pragmatists to provide a motivation for what he calls “epistemic optimism,” I contend that the crucial question of pragmatism, the problem of pragmatism, is the ontological status of pragmatic meaning. Thus rather than a mere “epistemic optimism,” I call upon pragmatists to assert a fallible yet unabashedly metaphysical optimism. The argument supporting this claim is made in the context of Peirce's “The Architecture of Theories.” In “The Architecture of Theories” Peirce opens the door to a pragmatic metaphysics while at the same time committing the error of subordinating truths and reality to “the long run of inquiry.” Rockmore suggest that the solution may lie in a return to Kant's notion of the “powers of the mind.” However, it is my contention that a solution to this problem cannot be found within Kant at all. I shall argue here that until contemporary pragmatism decisively extracts itself from the Kantian paradigm, the pragmatic philosophic value of pragmatic meaning will always be qualified, conditional and ontologically subordinated, having the same effect upon the standing of pragmatism as a philosophy as well. Moreover, I shall endeavor to show that when the Kantian paradigm is finally abandoned, pragmatism's classic difficulties with realism and what Peircc called “the long run” of scientific inquiry can also be resolved. Kantian “powers of the mind” and constructivist “epistemological optimism” would then be transformed into what I shall call unrestricted pragmatism. On the other hand if the Kantian impediment is not overcome, these difficulties will continue to form the basis of a more sceptical and traditionally restricted pragmatism, one which lacks the confidence desired by both Rockmore and myself.     

Fumerton's Puzzle for Theories of Rationality

Richard Foley has presented a puzzle purporting to show that all attempts in trying to find a sufficient condition of rationality are doomed. The puzzle rests on two plausible assumptions. The first is a level-connecting principle: if one rationally believes that one's belief that p is irrational, then one's belief that p is irrational. The second is a claim about a structural feature shared by all promising sufficient conditions of rationality: for any such condition, it is possible that one's belief satisfies it and yet one rationally believes that it doesn’t. With the two assumptions, Foley argues that a sufficient condition of rationality is impossible. I explain how exactly the puzzle goes and I try to offer a solution. If my solution works, all theorists of rationality who accept certain level-connecting principles need to add an extra condition to their favourite rationality-making condition.     

Atheism and Dialetheism; or, ‘Why I Am Not a (Paraconsistent) Christian’

In ‘Theism and Dialetheism’, Cotnoir explores the idea that dialetheism (true contradictions) can help with some puzzles about omnipotence in theology. In this note, I delineate another aspect of this project. Dialetheism cannot help with one big puzzle about another classic ‘omni’ property, omnibenevolence—the famous problem of evil. For someone (including a dialetheist) who thinks that the existence of evil is a knock-down argument against traditional theism, it is a knock-down argument against dialetheic theism, too.     

Genetic information: making a just world strange

In an article recently published in this journal, I raised a puzzle about the control of genetic information, suggesting a situation in which it might turn out that we have a duty to remain in ignorance about at least some aspects of our own genome. In this article, I propose a way that would make sense of how the puzzle arises, and offer a way to resolve it and similar puzzles in future: in essence, we would consider genetic information to be something the distribution of which may be more or less just. We would not know in advance what a just distribution would be, though, and in some cases there might still be a justice-based reason to deny a person genetic information about himself. However, others might also have justice-based claims to be able to access that information. This suggests that there is a possible world in which one person is entitled to at least some genetic information about another, while that other person—to whom the information refers—is not, and that this world would be just.     

A puzzle about epistemic akrasia

In this paper I will present a puzzle about epistemic akrasia, and I will use that puzzle to motivate accepting some non-standard views about the nature of epistemological judgment. The puzzle is that while it seems obvious that epistemic akrasia must be irrational, the claim that epistemic akrasia is always irrational amounts to the claim that a certain sort of justified false belief—a justified false belief about what one ought to believe—is impossible. But justified false beliefs seem to be possible in any domain, and it’s hard to see why beliefs about what one ought to believe should be an exception. I will argue that when we get clearer about what sort of psychological state epistemic akrasia is, we can resolve the puzzle in favor of the intuitive view that epistemic akrasia is always irrational.     

Mutually Exclusive Planning and the Simple View

There have been a number of challenges to the Simple View—the view that an intention to A is necessary if an agent is to A intentionally. Michael Bratman’s celebrated video game case has convinced many that the view is false. This article presents a novel objection to Bratman’s case. It is argued, first, that the Simple View is not undermined by the case, and second, that the real import of the case is that it raises the question of how we can rationally intend mutually exclusive ends. I offer a solution to this puzzle that draws on what I call the Self-Evaluation aspect of intention.     

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.