Paul Guyer has given us a study of a range of reactions to Kant’s moral philosophy from its first appearance down to the late twentieth century.Footnote ¹ The topics addressed – duty, self-perfection, the will, universalizability, happiness, utility, and humanity – testify to a career of research and reflection on Kant that has no contemporary parallel.

Guyer’s aim in the book is not simply expository. His further aim is to defend Kant’s moral philosophy from the charges it faced from the beginning that it is harsh and unfeeling, rigid and simplistic, and incompatible with human nature and the complexities of life’s dilemmas. The impact of Kant’s work on Guyer himself centres on the notions of equality, individuality, and autonomy. He finds in T. H. Green, Josiah Royce, H. J. Paton, and John Rawls statements reflecting what he regards as Kant’s greatest contribution to moral philosophy:

On Guyer’s view, Kant does not only teach that we must assume in practical contexts that we have free will (Wille) and can and must exercise it in morally demanding settings. He also demands greater social freedom for his contemporaries, in a way relevant for us today. There is a permission to live as we choose, provided this way of living does not infringe on others’ freedoms; others should not impede us in this respect and should indeed assist us. A number of passages appear to support this attribution (TP, 8: 290)Footnote ² and to state important principles that can be used to argue for healthier domestic relations and for progressive legislation.Footnote ³

As my own task in this exchange as a commentator on a commentary is to raise questions, I will focus on areas where Guyer’s interpretation seems to me to take Kant’s thinking in new directions, directions in which Kant himself would not have wanted to go. To the extent that Guyer is giving an account of Kant’s impact on his own thinking about what is valuable for moral philosophy in Kant, I have no grounds for criticism. But I am made uneasy by a gap between what I take to have been Kant’s own views and Guyer’s interpretation of his views. At issue are Guyer’s claims that Kantian morality is affirmative of, rather than (essentially and appropriately in my view) restrictive on human energy; that the conjunction of universal happiness and universal virtue, the summum bonum, is an important goal for Kant, able to guide individual and collective action; and that the enhancement of freedom, as Kant conceived it, is related to the forms of liberation that characterize contemporary conceptions of social justice and social progress.

In Chapter 11, on Nietzsche, Guyer ventures boldly that, as ‘[d]ifferent as their views are in so many respects, both Kant and Nietzsche take a certain kind of self-affirmation, rather than self-abnegation to be central to morality’ (346). This is to my mind a surprising interpretation, not only in light of the Kant-bashing in which Nietzsche indulges in the Twilight of the Idols. By self-affirmation, Nietzsche seems to have meant a joyous embracing of the moment. On a broader scale, this affirmativeness was related to the hoped for return and rule of the ‘haughty, manly, conquering, domineering … the highest and best-turned-out type of “man”…’ (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche1966: 75). As he says in the Gay Science, ‘The great and small struggle always turns upon superiority, upon growth and expansion, upon power in accordance with the will to power, which is just the will of life’ (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche1974: 292). There are harsher (Aschheim Reference Aschheim1994) and softer (Richardson Reference Richardson2004) interpretations of what ‘will’, ‘power’, and ‘will to power’ signify and imply in Nietzsche’s ethics, but it is hard to align Kant with even the softest interpretations. Nietzsche seems clear that ‘When the spirit is rich and independent it most resists any preoccupation with morality’ (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche1968: 237).

Kant’s concept of the summum bonum, the confluence of morality and happiness, i.e. well-being, is discussed throughout the book. The chapters on Rawls and Barbara Herman deal explicitly with the assumption that, as Herman puts it, ‘moral construction must be a real-world process – sustained collective action – of transforming the natural world into a moral world’ (quoted on 628). In relation to this objective, Guyer reads Kant as issuing two important demands and offering two permissions. First, supporting his claim with a reference to the Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR, 5: 110–1), he identifies a demand, an obligation on the part of each of us to work for a better world.

There is a permission attached to the demand. We ought to be concerned with universal happiness, but we should not make universal happiness our sole or chief end. Acting correctly must be our focus, not distributing beneficence. The conceptual separation of morality and happiness, as Guyer explains, is a neat rejection of both Stoic (virtue is happiness) and Epicurean (happiness is virtue) positions (81). However, virtue and happiness are brought together again in the utopian or at least perfectionist notion of a summum bonum.

For Kant, the highest good would be realized in a world in which, thanks to its perfect (or proportional) conformity to the moral law, everyone’s conduct would coincide with a general, i.e. universal happiness or the proportion deserved (A809/B837, quoted 25; cf. CPrR, 5: 111). In the Critique of Pure Reason, he was clear that there is no reason to think that personal morality, no matter how well and broadly practiced, must earn happiness for the agent. Only in an ideal possible world would this happen. In other contexts, however, the deferred or postulated or imagined conjunction of morality and happiness has an entirely different sense, and one that has nothing to do with the notion of divine rewards for the put-upon virtuous in an afterlife. In these contexts, happiness-with-morality is proposed as a possible future condition of the temporal world, achievable to at least some extent (570-1). So in ‘Theory and Practice’, Kant seems to be urging us to strive for a moral and happy real world through beneficent co-operation (TP, 8: 278–9, quotation on 89). In the Metaphysics of Morals, he says, quite movingly,

‘Happiness’, as Kant understands it, as half of the summum bonum, does not refer to a state of pleasant or blissful feelings, but to the absence of deprivations, to pleasurable activities, and to the freedom to live without irksome constraint and control by others. Going further, one might say that the happy life is not necessarily a life free of all frustration, adversity, and unpleasantness, but it is one in which not only basic needs for food, water, and shelter are met, but, as maintained by capability theorists, presentable clothing, political participation, leisure, friends, access to nature, educational opportunities, entertainment, etc. are within reach (Nussbaum and Sen Reference Nussbaum and S.1993).

Was Kant persuaded that the virtuous co-operation of individuals could increase the general well-being? This is unclear. Personal morality is within our individual control, but politics is not (TP, 8: 279–80, quoted, 88). And when the people and their intellectual allies demand reforms from the sovereign, Kant says, the ‘principle of happiness (which is really not fit for any determinate principle at all)’ can only give rise to evil, just as the pursuit of happiness does in private morality (8: 302). Kant is pessimistic that the confluence of morality and happiness can be realized during the lifespan of our species, despite some prognostic signs of political improvement. Indeed, he seems to have feared that the species might be annihilated by pointless wars before it had time to improve (MM, 5: 452). Obligatory hope is a proscription on the Epicurean choice to opt out of political engagement and retreat to hedonic individualism on the grounds that nothing really matters except the avoidance of pain and the enhancement of pleasure in the course of one’s own short life. This has been a temptation for intellectuals in every age, and Kant was worried about it (Wilson Reference Wilson2022: 32, 255–6).

Rawls (Reference Rawls1971/1999) was more optimistic. His ‘well-ordered’ society, Guyer comments, would be a realization of Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends’ (554) and so the summum bonum. According to Rawls, ‘should’ implies ‘can’. The conjunction of justice and happiness, he says, ‘can be approximated in the natural world, at least under reasonably favourable conditions’ (quoted 570).

One of Kant’s insights was that, since morality requires us to distance ourselves from our personal interests, which is difficult to do, we need a philosophical device, a psychological prop, to enable us to see what is required. Adam Smith found this in the idea of an imaginary impartial observer, Kant uses a universalization thought experiment involving the analogy between a moral law and a law of nature, and Rawls employs a veil of ignorance. For Rawls, in order to form maxims and policies that are just or fair, we cannot bargain as self-interested individuals who need to estimate their empirical chances of gaining or losing in power and enjoyment, even if this is how most people choose sides in politics. As Guyer comments, we function behind the veil as moral persons (546).

Morality for Kant involves putting brakes on selfish and disruptive interests. It is the counterweight to the self-interest that otherwise governs much of our lives. If you apply the universalization test, you are forced to consider yourself as ‘on the receiving end’ of everyone else’s fully operational maxim, functioning as a law of nature. The attempt to show that disregard of duties implies contradictions – Kant’s attempt to link moral duty to reason – is a strained and mostly unsuccessful way of representing the function of morality.

As Rawls realized, because the Kantian conception of the essence of morality as advantage-reducingFootnote ⁴ is so powerful, it can be employed whether the first-person standpoint is an ‘I’ standpoint or a ‘we’ standpoint. The world consists of multiple overlapping groups of persons who are poised in morally demanding situations – situations where one group has an advantage in the form of control, or an exemption from labour, or in the use of resources and opportunities, that they could at least partially renounce for the benefit of another. They are not inclined to do so, as it goes against their interests. Formerly, such ‘we-they’ pairs included slaveholders and slaves, men and women, well-armed countries and under-armed countries, rulers and conscriptable subjects, the law and homosexuals. For legislation and institutions to be just, on Rawls’s view, that is to say, morally correct, there can be no self-privileging of groups.Footnote ⁵ Through the device of the veil of ignorance, Nagel’s question ‘How would you like it if someone did that to you?’ takes on population-level significance.

Rawls’s contribution was not to reveal what people who want justice really want. He did not establish that other popular conceptions such as ‘justice is giving each his due’ (Aristotle), or ‘justice is giving each what others voluntarily decide they want to give him’ (Nozick), are less reasonable than maximin. But Rawls gave us something original and important – an extension of the Kantian first-person conception of morality to the social realm of group actors and patients. Rawls’s veil-of-ignorance methodology can be applied across the whole range of political and social institutions, even (though he resisted this application) in the family. It is a powerful, critics think too powerful, instrument for reducing inequalities of outcomes, for it invites us (though Rawls does not push this line) to see this as a moral, not just as a political problem. Gross inequality implies the adoption or maintenance by one group of policies its members would assuredly reject as unacceptable if they belonged to certain other groups.

Understanding why Kant did not employ this generalization move himself offers insight into the scope and limits of Kantian morality. Kant did not employ a veil-of-ignorance imaginative exercise for developing population-level moral maxims for several reasons. First, Kant’s world depended less than ours does on the sociological categorization of people into rivalrous groups with clashing interests. Second, when making up rules for administration and resource allocation, which is what Rawls is concerned with, we have to calculate and predict. Third, in framing social policies, we have to balance interests.

Calculating, predicting, and balancing interests are precisely what we are not supposed to do in Kantian individual morality. Guyer endorses Kant’s objection to Hutcheson’s proto-utilitarianism (354–5): We do not and cannot know how to maximize happiness globally or even nationally. But we do know how to tell the truth! No calculation is required or allowed as to who is currently ‘worst off’ in an inconvenient truth-telling situation and no prediction as to whether their position will be made worse if the truth is told.

There is a further reason why Kant would not have recognized Rawls as his natural heir. Like Rawls, Kant believed that he lived in an unjust society in which the rich had taken more than their share (LE, 27: 416, 455). But he did not see the unequal distribution of the components of well-being as a moral problem demanding redress, at least not in the same way as his utilitarian successors in the following century did.

Kant follows his remark about the duty of beneficence in the Metaphysics of Morals with a warning against paternalism. The patron who ensures a happy life for his serf does not act beneficently, that is to say, in accord with duty, morally, because he is able to dispense benefits only on account of an unjust social system (MM, 6: 454). Noblesse oblige is, in Kant’s view, pseudo-moral; it is inconstant, unlike privilege, which is enduring. Charity affirms the status quo and demeans the recipient. Paternalism, along with coercion, is a danger under so-called benevolent despotism. As Guyer points out in his Reply, Kant maintained that the monarchy was entitled coercively to tax the wealthy to provide for the badly-off (MM, 6: 325–6). The helplessly badly off – the beggar, the gravely ill, and the orphaned – are entitled, he thought, to support, and it is better given by the government than privately. But the transfer of responsibility for the destitute from the Church and the landowner to the state is as far as it goes for Kant, in terms of the redistribution of well-being. The monarchy should, as he sees it, avoid any more intense form of what would begin to look like a form of arbitrary generosity.Footnote ⁶

Freedom of a specific sort, the removal of certain specific forms of coercion, ranks higher for Kant than well-being, aka happiness. His explicit concerns are with drafting subjects into the army for princely glory and retaliation, with Prussian serfdom, not abolished till 1807, and with colonial slavery. The wake-up call of What is Enlightenment? of 1784 is addressed to a narrow, though important set of concerns in Prussian society, chiefly book censorship. Church authority, conscription, and taxation are mentioned in passing. In the name of freedom, Kant argued elsewhere for the removal of certain forms of coercion and constraint that threatened autonomy in a phenomenal sense (Hunter Reference Hunter and Ellis2012). These include aristocratic privilege in the occupation of important social roles and a limited franchise dependent on titled landowning. His late-life rejection of warfare and military culture falls into this category as well (Williams Reference Williams2012).

These enlightened proposals are consistent with Kantian morality: the rejection of advantage-pressing, but they are different from the proposals pressed by late eighteenth and nineteenth century social reformers. For this reason, I would resist reading Kant as broadly concerned with personal development in the contemporary sense of the furthering of every human being’s capabilities through a moralized political system that seeks to reduce inequalities and furnish opportunities.

The social reforms we have experienced since the early nineteenth century in some parts of the world – voters’ rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, child protection, public health and old age pensions, marriage and social acknowledgement for homosexuals, the abolition of US slavery – did not, for the most part, derive from Kantian sources or from notions of non-empirical foundational equality.Footnote ⁷ The reduction of privilege and force that improved lives through legislation is directly related to the writings and efforts of Wollstonecraft, Condorcet, Bentham and Mill, and Marx.

Can it be right in this connection to suggest that Mill’s On Liberty (not to mention his essay on the Subjection of Women) was a development of Kantian ideas about personal freedom, even if Mill ‘did not seem to have realized that he was following the path that had been blazed by Kant’ (629)? Guyer comments elsewhere on Mill’s summary dismissal of Kant’s universalization test, moderated only by his description of German philosophy as a useful corrective to British and French moral theory (425–6). For the period in question, only T. H. Green’s concern with phenomenal freedom and dignity, his criticism of the Victorian status quo, definitely references Kant (387). It is a welcome but isolated example of a positive Kantian influence. To my knowledge, the abolitionist movement in the USA owed more to Christianity and to the Lockean language of the Founders than to Kantianism. The statement that ‘Every member of a commonwealth must be allowed to attain any level of rank within it … to which his talent, his industry and his luck can take him’ is asserted in the limited context of a complaint about the reservation of posts for the hereditary nobility (TP, 8: 292).

Kant urges freedom of thought and freedom of publication, where critiques of throne and altar are concerned, the point of his appeal to his fellows in What is Enlightenment?, but his liberalism does not appear to extend to what today are called lifestyle choices, and he does not regard every human being as a reservoir of talents. Although he condemns the low aspirations of the indolent, pleasure-loving Tahitians, women only make themselves ridiculous when they try to read books. Where Guyer stresses the ‘freedom’ motif over what might be called the ‘control’ motif (see Gerhardt Reference Gerhardt1969; Adorno Reference Adorno1997), I see Kant as calling for more freedom almost exclusively in the sense of more use of Wille to control appetites, temptations, and inclinations, rather than in the sense of more toleration for and furthering of individual choice as required by modern liberalism.

There is no call in Kant to allow more Willkür – personality-based, individual preference and choice – to liven up our lives. The semi-Nietzschean ‘joys and delights’ we find in ‘the mere exercise of our powers, in consciousness of our strength of soul in overcoming obstacles opposed to our plans, in cultivating our talents of spirit, and so forth’, should not blind us, Kant thinks, to the recognition that valuing such experiences as higher pleasures furnishes no guide to morality (CPrR, 5: 24–5).

As Guyer’s study repeatedly shows, the freedom that was of central importance to Kant – and that formed the greatest part of the pre-twentieth century commentary on freedom and autonomy – was simply the freedom to resist solicitations of self-interest and inclination. This is noumenal freedom – it isn’t consistent with materialistic monism, and it isn’t intelligible in terms of mind-body dualism. It can’t be seen in action or even proved to be possible; yet Kant maintains that it is credible, that we feel from the inside that we have it; and that to give up belief in it would destroy morality. Human dignity is understood as our elevated position as a rational, self-controlled species over other species of animals.

What though did Kant believe about phenomenal freedom and phenomenal dignity for individuals? Guyer refers to ‘Kant’s conviction that everyone [has] equal humanity, or equal agency, or an equal ability to set his or her own ends’ (367). The fundamental equality of all human beings implying their equal rights was a conventional statement in legal metatheory, and it was not intended in Kant’s period to be applied in the letter of a legal code. I don’t see this thought figuring in Kant’s applied philosophy.

Phenomenal dignity for Kant implies a form of noli-me-tangere (Schott Reference Schott1988). My body and my efforts are not to be used by others for their profits, ambitions, and lusts. I am not a toy, and I should resist the incursions of vaccinations, transplants, and implants. Phenomenal dignity further reflects a Rousseauean sense of the artificiality of class distinctions. But that the average woman, or peasant, or African, deserves to be regarded with the same respect and recognition as a morally upright European man is a conviction impossible to find in Kant’s notes and lectures and at odds with what he has to say there.Footnote ⁸ It is not the case that, for Kant, everyone has roughly the same abilities, and so the same entitlements with respect to education, provision of opportunities, and choice of how to live. Rather, everyone has a specific role to play in the cosmological unfolding of human potential. ‘[N]ature wants every creature to reach its destiny through the appropriate development of all predispositions of its nature, so that at least the species, if not every individual, fulfils nature’s purpose’ (APV, 7: 329). Contemporary Kantians take Kant’s broad claims about human beings and freedom as admirably universal and general, but this is a creative misreading of Kant’s corpus taken as a whole, no less than Hegel’s troubling assertions about the usefulness and necessity of warfare.Footnote ⁹

Kant believed that asymmetries and exclusions were appropriate, and that hardship and poverty were the unfortunate price of advancing civilization. The a priori equality of all human beings is, he says ‘quite consistent with the greatest inequality on terms of the quantity and degree of … possessions, whether in physical and mental superiority over others, or in external goods, or in rights generally (of which there can be many) relatively to others’ (TP, 8: 291–2). There was no avoiding the fact, he thought, that the masses were willed by nature to toil for the sake of the advancement of culture in a state of oppression and ‘shining misery’ for the development of knowledge and the arts (CPJ, 5: 432). Women exist for the purpose of reproduction and maintenance, for ‘nature’s ends’, not their own. One’s [sic] principle cannot be ‘what we [sic] make our end, but what nature’s end was in establishing womankind’ (APV, 7: 305). Women’s desire to improve themselves by reading and to put their time under better control by watch wearing is ridiculed (7: 307). And were middle class women to become as socially free as middle-class men – free to set their own hours, to leave domestic tasks to others, to compete for lucrative and visible positions, to drink in taverns and coffeehouses – men’s freedom would be impinged upon, so this quasi-moral sacrifice of what one might take to be normal human interests and inclinations would be required from women in Kant’s own terms.

To conclude, Kant is a powerful, intriguing, and difficult author whose moral premises and procedures have been challenged on many sides – most recently by continental critical theorists, by feminists and opponents of racism, by partiality theorists, and by capability theorists and critics of Ideal Theory.Footnote ¹⁰ These post-WWII reactions also belong to the story of Kant’s impact on moral philosophy. There is no reason for Guyer to take up these interpretations and challenges – that would require another, very different book. But I would welcome a response to Theodor Adorno’s accusation that for Kant, ‘Freedom is spiritualised as freedom from the realm of causality, as an abstract general concept that is beyond nature’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1973: 219–20) and more evidence for the intriguing claim that Kant and Nietzsche have more in common as philosophers of self-affirmation than one might have thought.