3.1 Two kinds of hope

According to Blöser and Stahl, there are two kinds of hope: fundamental hope and non-fundamental hope. Fundamental hopes are the hopes that are constitutive of a person’s practical identity (Blöser and Stahl Reference Blöser and Stahl2017: 350). For instance, a mother’s hope for her child’s happiness is a constitutive part of her practical identity as a loving parent. Even if the hope for her child’s happiness has no instrumental value in promoting her child’s happiness, it is a rational hope because it is ‘essential to the hopeful person’s being the person she is’ (p. 354). This particular fundamental hope is constitutive of a mother’s commitment to the relationship between her and her child. The absence of this hope is a threat to the integrity of her practical identity as a loving parent (p. 355). In other words, the absence of this hope is a reflection of lacking a fully endorsed attitude toward the parental relationship. In Blöser and Stahl’s view, ‘a cancer patient’s hope for a full recovery, a political activist’s hope for the end of world hunger, or a religious person’s hope for life after death’ are all examples of fundamental hopes because they ‘play a crucial role in how that person sees and interprets the world’ (p. 350). By contrast, a person’s hope that they will catch the morning bus is a non-fundamental hope since the absence of this hope does not negatively influence their endorsement of their practical identity.

In Blöser and Stahl’s view, these two kinds of hope correspond to two ways of justifying the practical rationality of hope.Footnote ³ What makes non-fundamental hope reasonable lies in the instrumental value of engaging in hopeful activities.Footnote ⁴ For instance, what makes the hope that one will catch the morning bus rational is that engaging in this hope enables a person to wake earlier and fulfil their other rational goals. Thus, the practical rationality of non-fundamental hopes can be justified by referring to the benefits they produce. By contrast, the practical rational ground for fundamental hopes is ‘not about end promotion but about upholding one’s personal integrity’ (Blöser and Stahl Reference Blöser and Stahl2017: 355). In other words, ‘these hopeful activities are essential to the hopeful person’s being the person she is and … it is therefore non-instrumentally rational for her to continue hoping’ (p. 354).

It is to be noted that the distinction between fundamental hopes and non-fundamental hopes is not exclusive. Fundamental hopes can also have instrumental values. It is just that the ultimate reason for holding fundamental hopes is not their instrumental values. A mother’s hope for her child’s happiness might be conducive to the flourishing of her child because her hope might motivate her to take actions that can contribute to her child’s happiness. However, a mother does not hope for her child’s happiness because she believes that such a hope is conducive to her child’s happiness. She just has this hope as a caring parent.

The question thus becomes: is Kantian reasonable hope reasonable because of its instrumental value as non-fundamental hope or intrinsic value as fundamental hope? In the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant seems to suggest that hope for the highest good is a necessary resource for moral motivation (CPR, A813/B841). However, he rejects this view in his later work and argues that respect for the moral law is a sufficient incentive. Therefore, Kant does not believe that reasonable hope is practically rational and valuable merely because it promotes moral motivation.Footnote ⁵ If Kantian reasonable hope is a kind of fundamental hope that constitutes a person’s practical identity, then what practical identity does this hope correspond to?

3.2 Human beings as self-formative rational animals

In the Jäsche Logic, Kant says that the field of philosophy may be summed up in the following questions: ‘What can I know?’, ‘What ought I to do?’, ‘What may I hope?’ and ‘What is the human being?’ The first three questions all relate to the final one (JL, 9: 25). However, Kant scholars rarely discuss how the answer to the last question reveals what people may hope. In the Preface to the Religion, Kant clearly states that his four essays are intended ‘to make apparent the relation of religion to a human nature partly laden with good dispositions and partly with evil ones’ (R, 6: 11). Since Religion is a significant resource where Kant deals with what people may hope, this quotation suggests that the answer is found in the characterization of human nature.

In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant characterizes human beings as rational animals – ‘an animal endowed with the capacity of reason’ (Anth, 7: 322). The most salient feature of rational animals is that they confront an unceasing conflict between their rational and animal selves. Kant provides three perspectives for understanding this tension. First, from the perspective of humans’ motivation, humans possess both moral incentives and inclinations for happiness. In Kant’s view, when people attempt to execute their agency as finite rational beings, they recognize the command from the moral law and may experience the opposite drive from their finite and sensible nature. Second, from the perspective of being an independent moral agent, a person possesses both a positive predisposition to morality and humanity (R, 6: 27) and a natural propensity to evil (6: 30). In Kant’s view, ‘[t]he propensity to personality is the susceptibility to respect for the moral law as of itself a sufficient incentive to the power of choice’ (6: 28). However, Kant also notes that human beings have the propensity to prioritize self-interest over morality in their ‘supreme maxim’ (6: 32). Third, from the entire species’ perspective, humans possess the innate disposition of ‘unsocial sociability’ (6: 20).Footnote ⁶ People are social animals with ‘the impulse to society’ (6: 27) – they need to associate and be in a community with others. Simultaneously, human beings also have ‘comparing self-love’, which leads them to judge their happiness only by comparison with others (6: 27). This disposition to evaluate happiness based on comparison produces ‘jealousy and rivalry’, which causes continuous clashes with others (6: 27).

Besides characterizing human beings as rational animals, Kant also notes that a human being is different from a mere machine, for the machine only has a ‘motive power’. In contrast, human beings possess a ‘formative power’ (CPJ, 5: 374). He also states that his pragmatic anthropology concerns what the human being ‘as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’, which is different from physiological anthropology, which takes human beings as causally determined entities (Anth, 7: 119). The capacity for human beings to make themselves is their self-formative characteristic.

To summarize, Kant’s characterization of a human being has two aspects. First, humans are rational animals or finite rational beings who unavoidably experience tension between their rational and animal selves. This tension can be revealed from three perspectives: the tension between prudential desires and moral will, the tension between the predisposition to follow moral law and the propensity to disobey moral law, and the tension between the disposition to associate with others and the tendency to clash with others. Second, as self-formative beings, humans possess the capacity and disposition to strive for morally better selves. Kant summarizes the human species as ‘a species of a rational being that strives among obstacles to rise out of evil in constant progress toward the good’ (Anth, 7: 333). In summary, according to Kant, a human being is a self-formative rational animal.

In the next sub-section, I argue that reasonable hope is a constituent of humans’ practical identities as self-formative rational animals. This interpretation can reveal that the primary objects for reasonable hope in the Kantian picture correspond to the three ways of characterizing the tension between the human rational self and animal self.

3.3 Kantian reasonable hopes as fundamental hopes

Kant considers three primary objects of hope in his writings: ‘one’s own happiness (proportionate with one’s virtue; CPR, A809/B837), one’s own moral progress (R, 6: 46, 6: 48), and the moral improvement of the human race (i.e., social progress; CPrR, 8: 309)’ (Blöser and Stahl Reference Blöser and Stahl2017: 14). However, it is not clear on what basis Kant chooses these primary objects of ‘reasonable hope’ and what grounds their rationality. I believe a closer look at why Kant thinks there is reason to hope for these objects indicates that the three aspects of human character constitute the shared ground unifying these three objects. This analysis reveals that, from the Kantian perspective, hope does not play a facilitating role intended to promote practical ends; rather, hope is a constitutive part of humans’ practical identities as finite rational beings striving to become morally good people.

First, as finite rational beings, humans possess moral incentives and inclinations for happiness. A relevant question is what attitude a person may hold concerning these dual motivations for action. In the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduces hope for the highest good to reconcile moral incentives and desires for happiness. He asks, ‘If I do what I should, what may I then hope?’(CPR, A806/B834).Footnote ⁷ The answer is that one may hope that one’s happiness is in proportion to one’s virtue. In Religion, Kant argues that one can hardly avoid asking the above question: ‘For it cannot possibly be a matter of indifference to reason how to answer the question, What is then the result of this right conduct of ours?’ (R, 6: 5–6). Thus, holding a hopeful attitude that one’s happiness is proportionate with one’s virtue is a natural attitude possessed by those who self-identify as beings who can recognize the command of moral law and its unconditional bindingness and, at the same time, feel the inclination to pursue happiness.

Second, from the perspective focused on individual motivation, humans possess both a positive predisposition to morality and one to ‘radical evil’. According to Kant, the human being is ‘radically evil’ because there is a propensity in human nature to reverse ‘the moral order of his incentives in incorporating them into his maxims’ (R, 6: 36). Thus, holding a hopeful attitude for one’s own moral progress is a natural attitude held by those who self-identify as beings with these predispositions but still strive to become morally better people. In Kant’s view, when a person realizes the tension between his positive predisposition and evil propensity, ‘he must be able to hope that, by the exertion of his own power, he will attain to the road that leads in that direction, as indicated to him by a fundamentally improved disposition’ (6: 51). Thus, one must hope for moral progress because forfeiting this hope results in a threat to the integrity of one’s practical identity as a self-formative rational being.

Third, from the perspective focused on the species, human beings possess the disposition of ‘unsocial sociability’. They possess the need to associate with each other and also possess the propensity to fight each other. From this perspective, holding a hopeful attitude even in the face of seemingly unceasing human conflicts is a reasonable attitude if a person endorses their practical identity from the whole species perspective.

These three arguments indicate Kant’s belief that the answer to the question of what a human being is provides the answer to the question of what they may reasonably hope. In Kant’s view, Religion’s purpose is to make apparent the relation of religion to human nature (R, 6: 11). People reasonably hold these fundamental hopes because they are who they are as self-formative rational animals. Ultimately, this means the primary Kantian reasonable hopes are fundamental hopes that are based on rational grounds given their constitutive role in humans’ practical identities as self-formative rational animals.Footnote ⁸

On a constructivist reading of Kant’s ethics, the rational ground of reasonable hopes thus stems from people’s endorsement of their humanity despite their agential limitation. As suggested by Korsgaard, this endorsement of humanity then becomes the source of normative reason. In her view, ‘[i]t is necessary to have some conception of your practical identity, for without it you cannot have reasons to act. We endorse or reject our impulses by determining whether they are consistent with the ways in which we identify ourselves’ (Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard, Korsgaard and O’Neill1996: 120). On this line of reasoning, it is practically rational to hope for the highest good, for personal moral progress and for social progress because they are the source of people’s normative reasons – these hopes provide normative reason to ‘strive among obstacles to rise out of evil in constant progress toward the good’ (Anth, 7: 333).

Since Kant does not directly use the term ‘endorsement’, it is worth considering what endorsement of humanity means from the Kantian perspective. I suggest that the endorsement of humanity for Kant means valuing the position of human beings in the moral world as both ‘elevated’ and ‘humiliated’. According to Kant, when humans contemplate the authority of moral law, they have a feeling of humiliation that ‘takes place only relatively to the purity of the law’ and accordingly experience a ‘lowering of pretensions to moral self-esteem’. At the same time, humans also experience ‘an elevation of the moral esteem’ and accordingly ‘a feeling that is positive in its intellectual cause’ (CPrR, 5: 79–80). As a result, the moral law ‘lets us discover the sublimity of our own supersensible existence and subjectively effects respect for their higher vocation in human beings, who are at the same time conscious of their sensible existence and of the dependence, connected with it, on their pathologically affected nature’ (5: 89).

At this point, my interpretation differs from Korsgaard’s constructivist reading of Kant’s ethics. For Korsgaard, ‘a human being is an animal who needs a practical conception of her own identity’ (Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard, Korsgaard and O’Neill1996: 123). As a result, the endorsement of humanity for Korsgaard means valuing the fact that our practical identities are normative for us. In my reading, Kantian reasonable hope shares the same rational ground as respect for the moral law and for other finite but rational beings. In his practical philosophy, Kant argues that as finite rational beings we should treat other self-formative but finite beings in accordance with their dignity. On this line of reasoning, the rationality of fundamentally reasonable hopes for Kant derives from the moral reason of treating a rational agent of the human sort in a respectful way.

Thus, to respect the moral law without having a reasonable hope of making moral progress is not respect in its fullest sense. In contrast to Tessman’s belief (Reference Tessman2009) that individuals living under oppression can find the motivation to act against injustice even in the absence of hope based on their self-respect and moral integrity, a Kantian analysis of the value of hope indicates that certain fundamental hopes are constitutive of one’s self-respect and moral integrity. Upholding one’s self-respect and moral integrity in the fullest sense requires the possession of certain fundamental hopes.

Ultimately, in the Kantian picture, it is reasonable to hope for the highest good, for personal moral progress and for social progress, as these are fundamental hopes entailed by people’s endorsement of humanity.Footnote ⁹

4.1 Respecting others through their reasonable fundamental hopes

People have a moral duty to respect others in virtue of the dignity of their humanity. This implies that people need to respect others’ reasonable fundamental hopes – hopes that (a) are constitutive of practical identity and (b) are consistent with moral and political duties.Footnote ¹⁰ One way of understanding what Kant means by ‘If I do what I should, what may I then hope?’ (CPR, A806/B834) is as follows: ‘If I do what I should, what do I have a right to hope?’

However, it is unclear what the moral duty to respect others’ reasonable fundamental hopes amounts to. I do not aim to provide a full-fledged answer to this question in this article. However, I believe that this question is of significant practical value when considering how to respect individuals in their daily lives. In this article, I focus on one crucial requirement for respecting others’ reasonable fundamental hopes: people must appreciate the value of fundamental hopes beyond merely measuring their instrumental value. I will discuss how to fulfil this requirement from two distinctive perspectives – the perspective of personal relationships and the perspective of the social system.

Consider the following example. A mother learns that her child has a rare disease with only a 1 per cent chance of survival. The mother’s hope for her child’s recovery is one of her fundamental hopes because it is constitutive of her practical identity as a caring mother. This hope cannot influence her child’s outcome of survival; however, the hope is part of the mother’s valuing attitude toward her child and their unique relationship. If a doctor suggested the mother should abandon her hopes based on a mere calculation of benefits and costs, such as the concern for reducing the psychological pain of disappointment, one would find it reasonable for this mother to feel angry or even offended. This is because the rational ground for the mother’s hope is not merely the likelihood of attaining the desired outcome but also her valuing attitude toward her relationship with her child and her endorsement of her practical identity as a caring mother. Respecting a person’s fundamental hopes requires one to treat these hopes as being more than merely instrumentally valuable.

Nevertheless, the consideration of instrumental value is not completely irrelevant. It is legitimate for the doctor to tell the mother about the very low likelihood that her child will recover since the likelihood is relevant to the epistemic rationality of hope. It is epistemically irrational to hope for X if X’s happening is impossible. However, a caring doctor should communicate this information in a respectful way by recognizing the conflict between the practically and the epistemically rational aspect of hope. The doctor should acknowledge that giving up fundamental hopes amounts to denying part of who a person is. Being able to appreciate the non-instrumental value of others’ fundamental hopes is the first step toward respecting their reasonable fundamental hopes.

This argument only concludes that people should not treat others’ reasonable fundamental hopes as having only instrumental value; it leaves open the question of how this goal can be achieved in practice. In reality, the relationship involved in this scenario is much more complicated. It is not only the mother–child relationship that is at stake but also the child’s relationships with the father, siblings and friends. The mother’s hope for the child’s recovery might conflict with others’ hopes of saying goodbye to the dying person. My argument thus only aims to demonstrate that, no matter what the best practical choice may be, one should take the non-instrumental value of hopes into account and acknowledge the price of giving up fundamental hopes. In the next section, I aim to show that recognition of the non-instrumental value of reasonable fundamental hopes can reveal the struggling reality of victims of injustice in their political lives regarding holding and giving up their fundamental political hopes.

4.2 The dilemma of hope for victims of injustice

In limiting reasonable fundamental hopes to the narrower scope of fundamental political hopes, we can ask how one should respect other citizens’ reasonable fundamental political hopes. A woman’s hope for equal rights, for example, is not only a political but also a reasonable fundamental hope. First, this hope is constitutive of her practical identity as a responsible political agent. Second, her hope is consistent with her moral and political duties. This hope is entailed by her commitment to the pursuit of justice and her pursuit of a well-lived life, which she is entitled to pursue as a citizen. Thus, a woman’s hope deserves other citizens’ respect. These fundamental hopes are of value to victims of injustice not only because of their instrumental values but also because they are constitutive of the victims’ practical identities as responsible citizens striving to achieve legitimate political goals. In Kant’s view, there are four attributes of a citizen: ‘lawful freedom’, ‘civil equality’, ‘civil independence’ and ‘civil personality’ (MM, 6: 314). Civil personality is the ‘attribute of not needing to be represented by another where rights are concerned’ (MM, 6: 314). Holding fundamental political hopes formed in response to one’s specific life experience is an expression of one’s civil personality. The connection between holding fundamental political hopes and valuing one’s civil personality suggests that what count as fundamental political hopes for a person should be decided by the person themselves. Not everything that is morally permissible is worthy of our hope and thus a person has the freedom to form, choose from and decide to hold on to the hopes that are derived from their specific life experience.

However, one should not ignore the disadvantages victims of injustice face in their political lives when upholding their political hopes. First, political hopes held by victims of injustice are subject to exploitation. As Warren observes (Reference Warren2015), political hopes can be forced upon a disadvantaged group in society through a ‘politics of hope’. ‘[T]he politics of hope posits that one must have a politics to have hope’ (Warren Reference Warren2015: 219). In other words, ‘any existence of hope “outside” the political subverts, compromises, and destroys hope itself’ (Warren Reference Warren2015: 219). In Warren’s view, a politics of hope preserves the metaphysical structures that sustain Black suffering: ‘Progress and perfection are worked through the pained black body and any recourse to the Political and its discourse of hope will ultimately reproduce the very metaphysical structures of violence and pulverize black being’ (p. 218). Thus, one should instead embrace ‘Black nihilism’. Warren does not argue that Black people should not hold any political hopes but rather emphasizes that any hope produced within the unjust social system is an ‘exploited hope’ (p. 233) that ‘perpetuates black suffering by placing relief in an unattainable future’ (p. 233).

Second, political hopes held by victims of injustice might produce a negative total practical value for them. As argued by Stockdale (Reference Stockdale2019), besides focusing on the commonality of hope among all human beings, one should also pay attention to the variation in people’s experiences and capacities to hope. Some people tend to respond hopefully to agential limitations, while others tend to respond with doubt, frustration and sadness. Stockdale observes that hope’s objects, character, strength and capacity can all be affected by the social environment. When it comes to objects of hope, ‘[m]embers of oppressed groups often form hopes that arise because they live under the experience of threat of these kinds of injustice, such as the hopes to be free from violence, harassment, and neglect’ (Stockdale Reference Stockdale2019: 32–3). When it comes to hope’s character, a person’s hope might be ‘tainted with fear’ (p. 33), as in the instance of a woman’s hope to make it home safely, which is formed largely because she fears for her safety as a woman. When it comes to hope’s strength, ‘[o]ppression can threaten and damage hope through either diminishing the likelihood that a person’s hopes will be realized, through a loss of desire, or both’ (p. 34). Finally, the psychological effects of living under oppressive conditions can also threaten an individual’s capacity for cultivating or sustaining hopes for one’s own life and future (p. 33). Thus, despite the significant value of hope in political life, holding political hope may have a negative net practical value for members of oppressed groups resisting their own oppression when the benefit of hoping is less than its negative values.

With these insights comes a more comprehensive picture of the political hope dilemma that victims of injustice face. On the one hand, certain political hopes are reasonable fundamental hopes that are essential to people’s practical identities and to their interpretations of the world they inhabit. Holding these hopes derives from people’s endorsement attitudes toward their political goals and as a part of their expression of their ‘civil personality’ (MM, 6: 314). Thus, victims of injustice have non-instrumental reasons for sustaining their hopes for social justice, equal rights and a better political future. On the other hand, sustaining these hopes becomes an additional burden because these victims may be exploited in their hopes, may endure disappointment from brutal reality and more.Footnote ¹¹

The dilemma of hope faced by victims of injustice amounts to a kind of ‘affective injustice’, as Amia Srinivasan argues (Reference Srinivasan2018). According to Srinivasan, a person faces affective injustice when systematic social injustice produces an irreconcilable conflict between apt emotional responses and responses that are prudentially rational to feel. In the article ‘The Aptness of Anger’, Srinivasan notes that victims of injustice who express apt angerFootnote ¹² can experience counterproductive effects, including impediments to their epistemic rationality, alienation of potential allies, aggravation of conflict and encouragement of self-harm (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2018: 125–6). Apt counterproductive anger here is prudentially irrational since it fails to serve the self-interest of victims. However, apt anger ‘presents its object as involving a moral violation’ (p. 128) and is thus ‘a means of affectively registering or appreciating the injustice of the world … anger is also a form of communication, a way of publicly marking moral disvalue, calling for the shared negative appreciation of others’ (p. 132). From this perspective, apt anger has intrinsic moral value. Srinivasan argues that victims of injustice must choose between ‘making the world as it should be’ and ‘appreciating the world as it is’ (p. 133). Living in such a condition is itself unjust because it forces people into an unfair normative conflict through no fault of their own (p. 133).

This same argument applies specifically to reasonable fundamental political hopes held by victims of injustice. These hopes are apt emotions deriving from one’s valuing attitude toward one’s practical identity as a responsible citizen. However, the external world is structured in a way that makes it prudentially irrational to uphold such hopes when holding hopes tends to produce more negative values than benefits.Footnote ¹³ Systematic social injustice thus produces an unfair normative conflict through no fault of the victims of such injustice.

This situation means that when discussing the value of political hopes, one should look beyond their instrumental values to ask how the social system can sustain people’s rights to express themselves freely and pursue fundamental political hopes consistent with their moral and political duties.

Thus, from a Kantian perspective, we can discuss how to respect people’s reasonable fundamental hopes on two levels. On the level of personal relationships, respecting others’ reasonable fundamental hopes requires a person to appreciate the non-instrumental value of these hopes and acknowledge the price of giving up fundamental hopes. On the social structure level, respecting people’s reasonable fundamental hopes requires not only appropriate attitudes from other individuals but also the support of a just social system. The discussion should go beyond whether a woman should or should not be asked to uphold her hope for gender equality based on prudential concerns or whether Black people should or should not be asked to choose between striving to uphold their political hopes or embracing ‘Black Nihilism’ (Warren Reference Warren2015). Instead, people should also ask whether the existing social system allows victims of injustice to hold their fundamental reasonable hopes without facing unbearable counterproductive effects. Thus, a just society with the goal of granting equal respect to its citizens should allow its citizens to uphold their reasonable fundamental political hopes without facing the current dilemma.