Moral and political prudence in Kant

International Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 305-319

  Nelson, Eric Sean ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO   (United States)

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EID: 63549097353     PISSN: 00190365     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/ipq200444326     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. All references to Kant's works will be to the Akademie edition, cited by volume and page, unless otherwise noted: Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, Königliche Prüssische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902-1997)
2. A much shorter and substantially different version of this paper appeared as "Kant and the Art of Political Prudence" in Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung, Vol. 4, ed. V. Gerhardt, R. Horstmann, and R. Schumacher (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), pp. 220-27
3. The denial of the strictly moral import of prudence is often taken to be a denial of prudence as such. Ronald Beiner, for example, accuses Kant of "a thoroughgoing renunciation of ancient practical philosophy," in particular its idea of appropriate judgment, and he criticizes Kant for lacking an adequate account of prudence understood as phronesis in his Political Judgment (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 63-71
4. Kant claimed that "Prudence is directed only to means . . . and [is] no part of ethics" in the Opus Postumum, trans. Förster and Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993) 22: 39
5. These are technical imperatives of skill in the Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, where prudence or pragmatic imperatives concern the identifiable but indeterminate end of happiness or self-interest. See Immanuel Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, third edition, trans. J. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), pp. 416-20
6. In his Lectures on Ethics prudence has a complementary role to morality but also has more significant characteristics than in his later writings. See Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. L. Infield (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 4-5
7. Roger Sullivan places politics under morality but notes: "Kant, however, is not naive about political realities, and he also maintains that morality does not require us to be foolish in dealing with inconsistencies between the moral and civil law." Roger Sullivan, Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 251. This leaves open the question of the import of being prudent in the sense of not being foolish in Kant's conception of practical life
8. Kimberly Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 53
9. For example, R. Beiner identifies Kant's political thought with the determinate and universal concepts of right and the teleology of nature through which providence is assumed to promote progress (Beiner, 1983, pp. 63-71)
10. See Klaus Günther's discussion of the question of phronetic judgment in Kant in The Sense of Appropriateness, trans. J. Farrell (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 5-7, 171. Günther attempts to show the more nuanced character of deontological moral judgment and application in response to criticisms
11. For an account of the type of hypothetical imperatives called pragmatic or prudential, see Sullivan, 1989, pp. 31-36
12. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991)
13. Because of the a posteriori and empirical character of the art of prudence, Kant claimed that no canon can be provided for it (A 800/B 828). On the difference between doctrine or science and art, compare my discussion of this issue in "Schleiermacher on Language, Religious Feeling, and the Ineffable," Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 8:2 (2004) 297-312
14. The following translation is used in this paper: Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. T. Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983)
15. Robert Louden develops a thorough critique of this view in Kant's Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
16. However, at times Kant suggested that pragmatic imperatives of prudence and technical imperatives of skill are both merely corollaries of theoretical reason (5:172). But in his ethical writings he emphasizes the conditional ought-character of pragmatic imperatives. Thus, in the Lectures on Ethics, "Practical philosophy contains no technical rules: it contains only rules of prudence and morality, and it is, therefore, pragmatic and ethical" (Kant, 1963, p. 4). In the Grounding, all imperatives express an "ought." Hypothetical imperatives of skill and prudence are thus practical in expressing a conditional "ought." Technical imperatives are even here corollaries in that they are derived from theoretical information about what is (4: 413, 415-6)
17. Kant sometimes considered only the moral as such to be practical (5: 172), sometimes only the moral and prudential (Kant, 1963, p. 4), and sometimes all three
18. Such as Reflexion 1482, 15: 689
19. 20: 200; Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. Wood and Clark (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978) p. 92
20. From Immanuel Kants Menschenkunde oder philosophische Anthropologie, ed. Starke (XV, I: 5). Cited in and translated by Louden, 1999
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993)
22. First Critique quotations are from N. K. Smith's translation from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929)