INTRODUCTION

The Second Section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals contains three arguments that have the form: if there were a categorical imperative, this is what it would have to be like. Each of these arguments leads to a new set of terms in which the categorical imperative can be formulated. In summarizing these arguments, Kant tells us that universality gives us the form of the moral law; rational nature or humanity as an end in itself gives us the material of the law; and autonomous legislation in a kingdom of ends represents a complete determination of maxims and a totality of ends. The Formula of the Universal Law is to be used in actual decision making, we are told; the other two, which bring the moral law “closer to intuition” and “nearer to feeling” can be used to “gain a hearing for the moral law” (G 436).

Attention to these remarks about the relations among the three formulas has perhaps obscured the fact that the three formulas represent a progression in the argument that leads from “popular moral philosophy” into “the metaphysics of morals.” I think that it is sometimes supposed that Kant's claim that the categorical imperative is a principle of reason rests squarely on the Formula of Universal Law – i.e., on that formula's “formality.” The claims of the other two formulas to be rational principles are then taken to be based upon their presumed equivalence to the Formula of Universal Law.

When we hold a person responsible, we regard her as answerable for her actions, reactions, and attitudes. We use the concept of responsibility in two contexts, the legal and the personal. We use it in the legal context when we must determine whether to punish someone for a crime or make him liable for another's losses. We use it in the context of everyday personal interaction, when we are pressed to decide what attitude we will take toward another, or toward some action or reaction of another. It is frequently assumed that these two uses are the same or at least continuous. Because I have doubts about this, and some worries about the appropriateness of using the notion in the legal context, I want to lay that use aside. In this paper, my focus will be on our practice of holding people responsible in the context of personal relations.

I begin by offering an account of personal relations, derived from Kant and Aristotle, along with an explanation of why they require us to hold one another responsible. I then distinguish two views about what holding someone responsible involves. Specifically, I argue that to hold someone responsible is to adopt an attitude towards him rather than to have a belief about him or about the conditions under which he acts.

A person is both active and passive, both an agent and a subject of experiences. Utilitarian and Kantian moral philosophers, however, characteristically place a different emphasis on these two aspects of our nature. The utilitarian emphasizes the passive side of our nature, our capacity to be pleased or satisfied, and is concerned with what happens to us. The Kantian emphasizes our agency, and is concerned with what we do. Alternatively, we may say that the utilitarian focuses first on persons as objects of moral concern, and asks, “what should be done for them?” whereas the Kantian addresses the moral agent, who is asking, “what should I do?”

One might think that this can only be a difference of emphasis. Any acceptable moral philosophy must take both sides of our nature into account, and tell us both how people ought to be treated and what we ought to do. Yet the difference of emphasis can lead to substantive moral disagreement. Kantians believe in what are sometimes called “agent-centered” restrictions, obligations which are independent of the value of the outcomes they produce. Even when thinking of persons as objects of moral concern, the Kantian is more likely to focus on agency. The question “what should be done for them?” is answered, roughly, by “they should be given the freedom to make their own choices, and to do things for themselves.” Rawls believes that asking the agentless “what should be done for them?” leads to distortion in the utilitarian view of moral and political decision.

THREE KINDS OF VALUE THEORY

In this paper I discuss what I will call a “rationalist” account of the goodness of ends. I begin by contrasting the rationalist account to two others, “subjectivism” and “objectivism.” Subjectivism identifies good ends with or by reference to some psychological state. It includes the various forms of hedonism as well as theories according to which what is good is any object of interest or desire. Objectivism may be represented by the theory of G. E. Moore. According to Moore, to say that something is good as an end is to attribute a property, intrinsic goodness, to it. Intrinsic goodness is an objective, nonrelational property of the object, a value a thing has independently of anyone's desires, interests, or pleasures.

The attraction of subjectivist views is that they acknowledge the connection of the good to human interests and desires. Most things that are good are good because of the interest human beings have in them, an interest that can be explained in terms of the physiological and psychological constitutions of human beings and the other conditions of human life. In Kantian language, we may say that just as means are “conditioned” goods because their value depends on the ends to which they are means, most of our ends are conditioned goods because their value depends on the conditions of human existence, and the needs and desires to which those conditions give rise.

This volume contains the thirteen essays I published on Kantian ethics between 1983 and 1993. Part One consists of seven essays which are devoted primarily to the exposition, interpretation, and, in some cases, reconstruction, of Kant's moral philosophy itself. Part Two consists of six essays in which I compare and contrast Kantian ideas and approaches with those of other important moral philosophers, both in the tradition and on the contemporary scene.

The first essay in Part One provides a general survey of Kant's ideas about morality, the political state, and the ethical basis of religious faith, situating those ideas within Kant's general project of providing a critique of reason and in the historical context from which that project arose. The remaining six essays together constitute a short commentary on Kant's moral philosophy, following the order in which Kant himself presents his ideas in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, but bringing in material from his other ethical works.

Two themes dominate the interpretation of Kant which I offer in these essays. The first is the theory of value that I associate with Kant's Formula of Humanity. Kant differs from realists and empiricists not merely in the objects to which he assigns value, or in the way he categorizes different kinds of value, but in the story he tells about why there is such a thing as value in the world.

In recent years philosophers have welcomed the development of a widespread interest in philosophical ethics. In their concern about the bewildering ethical questions generated by medical technology, legal practice, and the power and responsibility of the modern corporation, members of the professions and of the public have turned to philosophy, traditional repository of rigorous moral thought. This concern has provided philosophers with an opportunity to show that our subject is important and useful, and that we have knowledge on which others might draw. And so the profession has responded with the development of courses, textbooks, and a vast literature on the questions of “applied ethics.”

Yet a gap between traditional ethical philosophy and the solution of ethical problems remains. Writers on applied ethics do not seem to draw very heavily on traditional theories, and certainly do not draw on their details. Often the “application” consists simply in borrowing a principle which the theory defends. And often that principle gives an answer which seems too facile and too extreme. Theorists, in turn, know that you can have a real mastery of the concepts and arguments of a complex ethical theory and yet, when confronted by an ethical problem, find that you have no idea what resolution the theory provides. To some extent this gap is sociologically produced, for often different people are drawn to the different kinds of work. But it may also be that we have not thought enough yet about what sort of an activity “applying” an ethical theory is.

In this paper I describe two distinctions in goodness which are often conflated, and try to show the importance of keeping them separate. The two distinctions in question are: the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goodness, and the distinction between ends or final goods, and means or instrumental goods.

It will help to begin by delineating the kind of value and the kind of judgment of value with which I am primarily concerned here. I take it that there are three primary categories of value with which the moral philosopher is concerned: namely, the rightness or justice of actions, policies, and institutions; the goodness of objects, purposes, lives, etc.; and the moral worth or moral goodness of characters, dispositions, or actions. My concern here is not with what constitutes moral worth or moral goodness but with the second category – with goodness as a feature of ordinary ends and purposes, states of affairs, objects, activities, and other things – that is, with the kind of goodness that marks a thing out as worthy of choice.

Within this category, we can distinguish, admittedly with some artificiality, three kinds of judgments of goodness that we make. We judge something to be good of its kind when we judge it to have the virtues appropriate to that kind. We may also judge something to be a good kind of thing, as when we say of friendship or books or health that they are good.

The Kantian approach to moral philosophy is to try to show that ethics is based on practical reason: that is, that our ethical judgments can be explained in terms of rational standards that apply directly to conduct or to deliberation. Part of the appeal of this approach lies in the way that it avoids certain sources of skepticism that some other approaches meet with inevitably. If ethically good action is simply rational action, we do not need to postulate special ethical properties in the world or faculties in the mind, in order to provide ethics with a foundation. But the Kantian approach gives rise to its own specific form of skepticism, skepticism about practical reason.

By skepticism about practical reason, I mean doubts about the extent to which human action is or could possibly be directed by reason. One form that such skepticism takes is doubt about the bearing of rational considerations on the activities of deliberation and choice; doubts, that is to say, about whether “formal” principles have any content and can give substantive guidance to choice and action. An example of this would be the common doubt about whether the contradiction tests associated with the first formulation of the categorical imperative succeed in ruling out anything. I will refer to this as content skepticism. A second form taken by skepticism about practical reason is doubt about the scope of reason as a motive.

Kantian ethical philosophy has often been criticized for its dependence on an untenable conception of the freedom of the will. Kant is supposed to have asserted that we are morally responsible for all of our actions because we have free will, and that we have free will because we exist in a noumenal world in which we are uninfluenced by the temptations of desire and inclination. If we existed only in the noumenal world, we would invariably act as the categorical imperative requires, but because we are also phenomenal beings we sometimes go wrong. The view so understood gives rise to several problems. First, the claim that purely noumenal persons would act as the categorical imperative requires may be questioned.

To later generations, much of the moral philosophy of the twentieth century will look like a struggle to escape from utilitarianism. We seem to succeed in disproving one utilitarian doctrine, only to find ourselves caught in the grip of another. I believe that this is because a basic feature of the consequentialist outlook still pervades and distorts our thinking: the view that the business of morality is to bring something about. Too often, the rest of us have pitched our protests as if we were merely objecting to the utilitarian account of what the moral agent ought to bring about or how he ought to do it. Deontological considerations have been characterized as “side constraints” as if they were essentially restrictions on ways to realize ends. More importantly, moral philosophers have persistently assumed that the primal scene of morality is a scene in which someone does something to or for someone else. This is the same mistake that children make about another primal scene. The primal scene of morality, I will argue, is not one in which I do something to you or you do something to me, but one in which we do something together. The subject matter of morality is not what we should bring about, but how we should relate to one another. If only Rawls has succeeded in escaping utilitarianism, it is because only Rawls has fully grasped this point.

THE NORMATIVITY OF MORALITY

One of the debates of recent moral philosophy concerns the question whether moral judgments express “internal” or “external” reasons. According to internalists, if someone knows or accepts a moral judgment then she must have a motive for acting on it. The motive is part of the content of the judgment: the reason why the action is right is a reason for doing it. According to externalists, this is not necessarily so: there could be a case in which I understand both that and why it is right for me to do something, and yet have no motive for doing it. Since most of us believe that an action's being right is a reason for doing it, internalism seems more plausible. It captures one element of our sense that moral judgments have normative force: they are motivating. But some philosophers believe that internalism, if correct, would also impose a restriction on moral reasons. If moral reasons are to motivate, they must spring from an agent's personal desires and commitments. This is unappealing, for unless the desires and commitments that motivate moral conduct are universal and inescapable, it cannot be required of everyone. And this leaves out the other element of our sense that moral judgments have normative force: they are binding. Some internalists, however, have argued that the force of internalism cuts the other way. If moral reasons must motivate, and I show you that an action is morally right, I have ipso facto provided you with a motive for doing it.

One of the great difficulties with Kant's moral philosophy is that it seems to imply that our moral obligations leave us powerless in the face of evil. Kant's theory sets a high ideal of conduct and tells us to live up to that ideal regardless of what other persons are doing. The results may be very bad. But Kant says that the law “remains in full force, because it commands categorically” (G 438–39). The most well-known example of this “rigorism,” as it is sometimes called, concerns Kant's views on our duty to tell the truth.

In two passages in his ethical writings, Kant seems to endorse the following pair of claims about this duty: first, one must never under any circumstances or for any purpose tell a lie; second, if one does tell a lie one is responsible for all the consequences that ensue, even if they were completely unforeseeable.

One of the two passages appears in the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. There Kant classifies lying as a violation of a perfect duty to oneself. In one of the casuistical questions, a servant, under instructions, tells a visitor the lie that his master is not at home. His master, meanwhile, sneaks off and commits a crime, which would have been prevented by the watchman sent to arrest him. Kant says:

Upon whom … does the blame fall? To be sure, also upon the servant, who here violated a duty to himself by lying, the consequence of which will now be imputed to him by his own conscience.