Overview
- Is an in-depth and carefully argued account of the model of rational agency underlying Kant’s moral philosophy
- Takes a wholly new slant on Kant’s moral thought
- Compares Kant’s moral philosophy with the work of Aristotle, John Searle, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Brian O’Shaughnessy
Part of the book series: Studies in German Idealism (SIGI, volume 21)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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The Traditional Model
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Front Matter
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Interpreting the Traditional Model
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book outlines and circumvents two serious problems that appear to attach to Kant’s moral philosophy, or more precisely to the model of rational agency that underlies that moral philosophy: the problem of experiential incongruence and the problem of misdirected moral attention. The book’s central contention is that both these problems can be sidestepped. In order to demonstrate this, it argues for an entirely novel reading of Kant’s views on action and moral motivation.
In addressing the two main problems in Kant’s moral philosophy, the book explains how the first problem arises because the central elements of Kant’s theory of action seem not to square with our lived experience of agency, and moral agency in particular. For example, the idea that moral deliberation invariably takes the form of testing personal policies against the Categorical Imperative seems at odds with the phenomenology of such reasoning, as does the claim that all our actions proceed from explicitlyadopted general policies, or maxims. It then goes on to discuss the second problem showing how it is a result of Kant’s apparent claim that when an agent acts from duty, her reason for doing so is that her maxim is lawlike. This seems to put the moral agent’s attention in the wrong place: on the nature of her own maxims, rather than on the world of other people and morally salient situations. The book shows how its proposed novel reading of Kant’s views ultimately paints an unfamiliar but appealing picture of the Kantian good-willed agent as much more embedded in and engaged with the world than has traditionally been supposed.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Kant on Maxims and Moral Motivation
Book Subtitle: A New Interpretation
Authors: Peter Herissone-Kelly
Series Title: Studies in German Idealism
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05572-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-05571-4Published: 25 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-05572-1Published: 17 January 2019
Series ISSN: 1571-4764
Series E-ISSN: 2542-9868
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 212
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Ethics, Moral Philosophy, German Idealism