The value of reason and the value of freedom

Ethics

Volumn 109, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 22-35

  Guyer, Paul ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 24944571544     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233871     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Onora Nell, Acting on Principle: An Essay on Kantian Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975);
2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
3. An outline of the approach to Kant's ethics that Rawls expounded is available in his essay "Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy," in Kant's Transcendental Deductions: The Three "Critiques" and the "Opus postumum," ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 81-113. A much fuller presentation of Rawls's approach will become accessible when the full text of his lectures, currently being edited by Barbara Herman, is published.
4. In addition to Acting on Principle, see Onora O'Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice and Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), chap. 7, pp. 121-43,
5. and the essays collected in Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
6. Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993);
7. and Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).
8. Wood has discussed aspects of Kant's ethics in Allen W. Wood, Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970),
9. and Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chaps. 8 and 9, pp. 140-73, as well as in numerous articles. He is currently completing a monograph on Kant's ethics, focusing on Kant's moral anthropology.
10. According to the third Antinomy of Pure Reason in the first Critique, it is the possibility of conceiving of such a single act of creation, a possibility created by the distinction between phenomena and noumena, that averts an infinite regress of explanations in the case of theoretical reason - which is precisely what makes it difficult to see the resolution of that antinomy as doing much to make room for the possibility of human freedom, which presumably exists in multiple and repeated instances of action (contrast Kant's hopeful comment in the remark on the thesis of the third antinomy [at A450/B478] with his comment in the remark on the antithesis that "it can never be permitted to ascribe such a faculty [of freedom] to substances in the world itself" [A451/B479]).
11. G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law: The Scientific Way of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 76.
12. I substitute 'persons' for Korsgaard's 'others' because she is alluding to Kant's argument in the Doctrine of Virtue that it is the happiness of others that is a necessary end for us (see 6:288), although the logic of universalizability requires that we see the chosen ends of all, including ourselves, as good - as Kant eventually implies at 6:451. All citations in Kant will be located by the volume and page number of the passage as given in Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian (later German) Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Georg Reimer [later Walter de Gruyter & Co.], 1900-).
13. Herman, pp. 14-15.
14. Groundwork, 4:412.
15. Translation from Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 65.
16. For some explanation of this claim, see my introduction to Paul Guyer, ed., Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. xi-xlv,
17. and my "Self-Understanding and Philosophy: Kant's Strategy in the Groundwork," in Philosophie in synthetischer Absicht: Festschrift für Dieter Henrich, ed. Marcello Stamm and Christian Klotz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998).
18. Groundwork, 4:393; Gregor, ed., p. 49.
19. Groundwork, 4:435-36; Gregor, ed., p. 85.
20. Groundwork, 4:428, quoted at Korsgaard, p. 116.
21. In this and the following citation I give Korsgaard's rather than Gregor's translation; Korsgaard in turn follows Immanuel Kant, The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959).
22. Groundwork, 4:428, quoted at Korsgaard, p. 115.
23. Naturrecht Feyerabend, 27:1319. The volume number refers to the Akademie edition, Kant's Vorlesungen über Moralphilosophie, in three parts, edited by Gerhard Lehmann (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974-78). The translations from this are my own.
24. Naturrecht Feyerabend, 27:1321.
25. Naturrecht Feyerabend, Ibid., 27:1319.