Abstract
This chapter aims first of all to mount an argument for the conclusion that incentive reasons are genuine agent’s reasons, rather than merely explanatory reasons. That is, incentive reasons are reasons in the light of which an agent comes to take the obtaining of an F-type situation as a reason to Φ, rather than factors that causally explain an agent’s viewing F-type situations in that way. Having established this much, I go on to offer experientially congruent accounts of the incorporation of incentives into maxims, an agent’s constant awareness of the moral law, and the Categorical Imperative’s universalisability test. This will bring into focus the way in which a good-willed agent’s being moved to act by the obtaining of an F-type situation differs in kind from a non-good-willed agent’s being similarly moved. A Kantian good-willed agent, I will urge, is moved by a situation’s merely obtaining (and thus by, as I shall put it, a bare situational reason), in a way that the non-good-willed agent is not: indeed, it is her being so moved that is responsible for her qualifying as good-willed.
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- 1.
Dancy (2000), p. 5.
- 2.
Dancy (2000), p. 5.
- 3.
It may be pointed out that there are cases in which A’s having forgotten his promise to B could be a consideration in the light of which he acts. For example, A’s having forgotten his promise may be the reason why he buys B a bunch of flowers, where the buying of the flowers is intended to atone for his having forgotten. However, such a case is one in which A has subsequently become aware of having forgotten his promise, and this is clearly not the sort of case that Dancy has in mind.
- 4.
Dancy (2000), p. 6.
- 5.
- 6.
Richard McCarty, in McCarty (2008, 2009), pp. 71–81, denies that Allison’s Incorporation Thesis represents Kant’s view at all. The passage from the Religion cited in its support certainly expresses what McCarty calls an incorporation requirement, but that requirement, the argument runs, is not equivalent to Allison’s Incorporation Thesis. The context in which the passage appears, McCarty explains, is as part of a defence of rigorism, or the view that a given human being is either good or evil, with no intermediate position possible. Rigorism in turn is presented as part of a defence of Kant’s notion that human beings are characterised by radical evil. When Kant writes, then, that an incentive can determine the “freedom of the power of choice” to action only in so far as “the human being has incorporated it into his maxim (has made it into a universal rule for himself, according to which he wills to conduct himself),” the maxim in question is no ordinary, workaday maxim of action . Rather, it is that most fundamental maxim, choice of which represents choice of an entire empirical character. Once that character has been chosen, McCarty seems to argue, the incorporation of incentives is no longer free: to have an incentive simply is, automatically so to speak, to have a corresponding maxim. In McCarty (2008), p. 432, he writes that “[t]o ‘incorporate’ an incentive into a maxim … is just to think of some object as good, including it in a subject-term in a principle of practical reasoning”. Again, in the same place we read “to desire an object is to represent it as good, in a maxim”. This is because maxims of action, for McCarty, simply are desires, and so simply are representations of objects as good. Whichever of an agent’s incentives (maxims) is the most forceful in a given situation will be the one that issues in action.
I do not agree with McCarty’s rejection of the Incorporation Thesis as an interpretation as Kant. Although it would take me too far off-track to explain in any great detail my reasons for disagreeing, a handful of considerations can be offered here. First and foremost, I think that Kant takes seriously the sorts of factors I consider in the remainder of Sect. 6.2, and thus that he thinks we need to be able to regard all our actions, and not simply some fundamental action of choosing a character, as free. Secondly, even supposing the passage from the Religion to be addressing solely the choice of our most fundamental maxim, it does not follow from this that something similar cannot be said about our other maxims, or (in other words) that the point about free incorporation cannot be generalised. Thirdly, the context of a defence of rigorism is not present in the other passage in which Kant seems to be presenting the Incorporation Thesis: namely, in the passage from the Critique of Pure Reason that I first quote in Sect. 2.2.1. As a result, there is no reason to suppose that Kant is there restricting what he says to the case of our most fundamental maxim.
Finally, the identification of subjective principles of action with desires is only possible for McCarty because of the form he attributes to maxims of action : viz., ‘X is good’. This allows a maxim of action to be just what a desire (arguably) is: a representation of something as good. In response to this point, an opponent of the Incorporation Thesis as a reading of Kant might maintain that we need not identify desires and maxims in order to motivate the sort of reading that McCarty is putting forward. Instead, we could simply say that the presence of any incentive will automatically lead to the adoption of a maxim with that incentive as a conative correlate . In any situation in which there is a clash between maxims, then, the one ‘powered’ by the strongest incentive will be acted upon. This picture, however, produces a result that it seems to me Kant will be unwilling to accept. That is, wherever anyone has a desire D that will invariably lose out to other desires, and never issue in action, they will thereby have a maxim that will never be acted upon, regardless of whether or not the situation mentioned in that maxim’s antecedent obtains. But it would appear odd to say that this principle which will never be acted upon counts as a maxim of action : it would seem more accurate to say that the agent possesses D, but that D is incorporated in none of the agent’s subjective principles of volition.
- 7.
Allison (1990), p. 40.
- 8.
Reath (2006), p. 13.
- 9.
Searle (2001), p. 71.
- 10.
Allison (1996), p. 130.
- 11.
Searle (2001), pp. 12–13.
- 12.
Kant (1996a), 4: 447–448.
- 13.
Brewer (2002), p. 544.
- 14.
Searle (2001), p. 75. Searle is happy to acknowledge that such steering and determining may for all we know actually be causally conditioned. His point however, which mirrors Kant’s in the Groundwork, is that we are constrained not to think of it in this way: if it is to happen at all, we must regard ourselves as producing it.
- 15.
O’Shaughnessy (1966).
- 16.
Note the passivity apparent in the notions of a mere happening or a mere event. Such passivity seems to belong essentially to receptivity, while an active ‘doing’ belongs to spontaneity . There are philosophical positions that hold not only that actions are not mere events, but (pace Davidson) that they are not events at all. Maria Alvarez and John Hyman , for instance, in Alvarez and Hyman (1998), argue that agents cause events, and that an action, rather than being an event caused by an agent, is to be identified with an agent’s causing of an event.
- 17.
Shakespeare (1951), Act III, Scene I.
- 18.
O’Shaughnessy (1966), p. 172.
- 19.
Kant (1998), A534/B562.
- 20.
Searle’s pronouncements on the causal insufficiency of an action’s psychological antecedents seem at times to embody something like Kant’s ‘two standpoints’ doctrine. For example, he writes in Searle (2001), pp. 73–74:
What makes [an] action a psychologically free action is precisely that the antecedent psychological causes were not sufficient to cause it. Perhaps at some different level of description, perhaps at the level of synapses and neurotransmitters, the causes were sufficient for the bodily movements, but at the level of description of intentional action, the definition of a free (voluntary, rational, conscious) action is that it does not have causally sufficient psychological antecedents.
- 21.
Searle (2001), p. 74.
- 22.
Kant (1998), A341/B399 ff. This section of the Critique of Pure Reason argues that it is illegitimate to infer anything at all about the nature of a self from the necessary presence of the ‘I think’ in apperception.
- 23.
It should be noticed that this ‘gap’ precedes the rather automatic exercise of a KPS discussed in Sect. 4.3.
- 24.
Reath (2006), p. 19.
- 25.
Reath (2006), p. 19.
- 26.
Reath (2006), p. 19.
- 27.
Korsgaard (1997), p. 234.
- 28.
Herman (1993), p. 221, n. 28.
- 29.
Allison (1990), p. 5.
- 30.
Kant (1996a), 4:427.
- 31.
I suppose it could be claimed that the incorporative act is a non-empirically-accessible adjunct to the empirically accessible act of maxim adoption, or an intelligible act that accompanies the adoption of a maxim. As I am about to suggest, I do not believe that this is how we should think of incorporation. Rather, when I adopt a maxim, that act of adoption is an act of incentive incorporation. Therefore, if maxim adoption is empirically accessible, so is incentive incorporation.
- 32.
It might be argued that the conception of desire on display here is an artificially narrow one, and that it fails to capture the full range of our everyday talk of desires. For example, we tend not to speak only of our desiring states of affairs, but also of our desiring things, whether concrete (a pint of beer) or abstract (happiness). We also talk as if the objects of our desires are not solely made up of potential or actual ends, or of things that I could aim at, or endeavour to bring about. For instance, I may be said to desire that the weather be fine for Saturday’s cricket match, even though I cannot sensibly aim at producing fine weather.
These objections can perhaps be countered. We might say that my supposed desire for a pint of beer is in fact a desire for the state of affairs of my consuming a pint of beer; and that my desire for happiness is a desire for the state of affairs of my being happy. And, it could be argued, my supposed desire for things that I cannot achieve by will might more accurately be described in different terms: what I intend to convey with the sentence ‘I desire good weather for the cricket match’ might better be expressed by ‘I hope that the weather is good for the cricket match’. Cf. Anscombe (1957), Section 36: Anscombe , however, wishes to restrict the use of ‘desire’ to cases in which the object of the desire is an end, which is not in accord with my usage. However, whether this last point is correct or not, my aim here is unaffected. That is, I am focussing exclusively on those desires that could be incorporated into maxims, and so on those with objects that could be converted into ends. There may or may not be other varieties of desire, but if there are, then those varieties are not what I am concerned with here.
- 33.
I talk here of a desire’s not being incorporated into any maxim, only in order to keep my account of incorporation as clear as possible. I am of course able to incorporate a desire O into a new maxim, when O is already a conative correlate of one or more of my existing maxims. Correlatively, it is possible for me already to have the object of O as an end E associated with, say, the maxims Mn and Mn + 1, prior to my gaining a maxim Mn + 2, which also has E as a conative correlate. In gaining Mn + 2, I can be said to be taking on a new way of having E as an end.
- 34.
Korsgaard (1996), pp. 179–180.
- 35.
I will suggest in Sect. 7.2 that it will also shape what we might call her practical identity in a way that having unincorporated incentives cannot.
- 36.
There are two senses in which an obtaining F-type situation could be said to be encountered as a potential reason to Φ for an agent who has an unincorporated incentive I. (1) it might be potentially a normative reason for her to Φ provided that, if the object of I were to be converted into an end E, the existence of an obtaining F-type situation would be a normative reason for her to Φ (that is, if there is a hypothetical imperative of the form ‘If you will the end E, then you ought to Φ when an F-type situation obtains’); and (2) it might be potentially a motivating reason as well (but does not necessarily become one as soon as it becomes normative). Where Φ-ing in F-type situations is a duty, and where the obtaining of an F-type situation is consequently apprehended as a moral reason to Φ, it will be encountered as a potential reason in the second sense only. That is, the obtaining of an F-type situation will already be a normative reason to Φ, and will not only become one on the occasion of the agent’s gaining some end or other.
- 37.
By this I do not mean that the agent will encounter the situation of her imagining herself or conceiving of herself in an F-type situation as a potential reason to Φ. Rather, I mean that, in imagining or conceiving of herself in an F-type situation, she will encounter that imagined or conceived situation as being of a type such that, if it were actual, it would be a potential reason for Φ-ing.
- 38.
Kant (1996a), 4:412n.
- 39.
Sartre (1969), p. 436.
- 40.
This last point will prove important in Sect. 6.5, in showing how my account of the incorporation of the moral motive does not, perhaps despite appearances, fall foul of the symmetry thesis.
- 41.
It seems legitimate at this point to ask just why the agent takes that O-aspect seriously, or why (equivalently) she comes to regard the state of affairs of her appearing heroic to be worthy of pursuit, and so undertakes to pursue it. One possibility is that her coming to regard the state of affairs in this way is a result of her holding some meta-maxim that serves to promote some over-arching end (that of maximising self-esteem, perhaps), or that aims to produce a certain harmony amongst the agent’s ends, or what have you. But, of course, while it might be legitimate to appeal to such a meta-maxim, doing so only makes the ‘why’ question appear again at a higher level. That is, we now want to ask why the agent holds that meta-maxim, or why she holds the end that is one of its conative correlates. Kant’s response is apparently that all such enquiries will find their terminus in a reference to the agent’s Gesinnung, or fundamental disposition. It is in the light of the Gesinnung that all ends and all maxims are ultimately chosen.
There is a problem here, though, and Kant is keenly aware of it (see Kant (1996c), 6:21n.). The Gesinnung is characterised as “the first subjective ground of the adoption of … maxims” (Kant (1996c), 6:25). But Kant also tells us that “apart from a maxim no determining ground of the free power of choice ought to, or can, be adduced” (Kant (1996c), 6:21n.). The clear implication is that the Gesinnung is itself a maxim, and certainly Kant is adamant that it is freely chosen, in accord with what in Sect. 3.2 I called his doctrine of profound imputability . However, this manoeuvre may appear to rescue imputability only at the cost of coherence. At the very least, it seems just to delay the problem once again—on the grounds of what, we want to ask, do we choose our Gesinnung? And it seems that, for Kant, quite apart from the threat of infinite regress, there is nothing more fundamental than a Gesinnung in the light of which a Gesinnung could be chosen. Traditional interpretations of Kant try to circumvent the problem by attributing special properties to the choice of a Gesinnung. It is, they say, a timeless, noumenal choice. It seems to me that this just sidesteps the problem by introducing a mystery that is in principle impenetrable.
Some commentators, however, have refused to adopt such a quietist attitude to the problem. Instead, they have tried to render the variety of choice that must be involved in the selection of an agent’s Gesinnung unremarkable. Henry Allison , for instance, holds that reflection reveals to us that we have all along been voluntarily committed to a particular type of disposition. See Allison (1990), Chap. 7. And Thomas Baldwin (perhaps more plausibly, though by no means unproblematically) holds that, for Kant, there is not one single choice of Gesinnung which takes place at a determinate time. Rather, all our choices are composed of two aspects: they simultaneously proceed from, and are a voluntary endorsement of, a particular Gesinnung. According to this view, then, we might say that whenever we take seriously some O-aspect of a situation, we are at the same time taking seriously—that is, endorsing—that in us which takes that O-aspect seriously. In taking an O-aspect seriously, we are, like Janus, facing in two directions at once. See Baldwin (1980), pp. 40–41.
Nonetheless, if it is the case that all our choices are both expressions and endorsements of our Gesinnung , then it is hard to see how, qua such expressions, they could be anything but endorsements. On this model, choice of Gesinnung seems to reduce to the exercise of our existing values in order to endorse our existing values. And if this is so, endorsement is nothing over and above exercise. If it is just in this that our freedom consists, then Kant’s account of it seems to boil down to a sophisticated version of the compatibilism he memorably dismisses as the freedom of a turnspit, in Kant (1996b), 5:97. Profound imputability turns out to be rather less profound than we might have hoped, and our choices seem to be less free than Kant wants them to be. (It should be pointed out that Baldwin attempts a resolution of this difficulty, but it is one that is rather un-Kantian, relying as it does on the claim that the Gesinnung must always be indeterminate.)
There can be no doubt that this is a hugely important issue, and one that must be resolved before Kant’s moral philosophy can be fully accepted. Unfortunately, it is also an issue that lies far beyond the scope of the current work, though one to which I would hope to return in future research on the topic.
- 42.
There are similarities between my account of incorporation and Talbot Brewer’s : see Brewer (2002), Section 5. As in the case of our accounts of maxims, the similarities are entirely coincidental. But, again as in the case of maxims, there are also important differences. Briefly, and somewhat roughly, Brewer accepts a Scanlonian account of desire in the “directed-attention sense,” claiming that “desires are hardly ever reasons for the actions toward which they incline us; rather, to have a desire is to direct one’s attention at considerations that seem to provide independent reasons for these actions” (Brewer (2002), p. 551). This may seem to mirror my stance, but it appears that the considerations that Brewer has in mind are best described as objects of desires, or potential ends. And ends, potential or otherwise, are not for Kant reasons for action.
Brewer advances the claim that desires are candidate maxims, and that to incorporate a desire into a maxim is (if I understand him aright) simply to assent to the object of that desire being a reason for action. He asserts that this is possible, since desires and maxims supposedly display a certain structural isomorphism:
Maxims have two placeholders: one for some list of considerations that one counts as reasons for acting, and another for the generic action description for which one counts these considerations as sufficient justification (Brewer (2002), p. 554).
Meanwhile:
To be in the grip of a desire is to be tempted to accept the validity of inferences from the generic class of considerations that the desire presents as reasons, to the generic action type that the desire inclines one to perform. Desires differ from maxims only in that we can have a desire without actually accepting the adequacy of the “inference ticket” we find encoded in it, whereas we only have a maxim when we do somehow accept the adequacy of the relevant inference ticket (Brewer (2002), pp. 554–555).
These are, in some ways, rather strange claims. First of all, as we discovered in Sect. 5.5, Brewer , along with Rawls , subscribes to ME rather than M as the form of a maxim of action. Therefore, he officially holds that such maxims have three placeholders rather than two. His modified, two-placeholder account, presumably builds mention of the agent’s purposes into the specification of the situation in which she will act, which appears not to make ends reasons for action on their own, but only in concert with situations (see Sect. 5.5 for a discussion of this view). But surely a desire contains no reference to situations, even though, as I have maintained, it leads us to encounter certain situations in certain ways. Secondly, and similarly, it seems strange to count “the generic action type that [a] desire inclines one to perform” as a constituent of a desire. If I desire S, I will (ideally) be aware that there is some type of action that would (under certain circumstances) help me achieve S. And I suppose I could be said to be ‘inclined’ by the desire to perform actions of this type, but that is not to say that I must desire to perform them (which, if it were the case, might allow them to count as part of the desire). I can perfectly well desire to catch the bus that is just leaving the stop, and so be inclined to run for it, without it being the case that I desire to run for the bus.
- 43.
It will be recalled from Sect. 5.2 that only the first formulation—the Formula of Universal Law —is to be thought of as the moral incentive, or as that which determines the will of the agent who acts from duty.
- 44.
Only a maxim of strict obligation, or of a perfect duty, will be held on moral grounds alone, and so will not be held on the basis of any end. My central focus is on such maxims. As we will discover shortly, a maxim that an agent allows herself to hold on the grounds that it is morally permissible, will be a maxim that will have incorporated not only the moral incentive, but also some empirical incentive, and so will be held partially on the basis of the object of that empirical incentive. However, the permissibility of action on that maxim will not be dependent on its capacity to achieve the object of any incentive. Imperfect duties present something of a special case. As we learned in Sect. 3.3, such duties provide us with a certain leeway in choosing precisely how we fulfil them. So, for example, we have a duty of beneficence, but no strict duty to perform any particular beneficent act. Presumably, then, which beneficent acts we do elect to perform can be guided in part by inclination, and the maxims of such actions will consequently be held in part on the grounds of their capacity to realise the objects of empirical incentives. So much is hinted at by Kant, when he writes in the Groundwork that “a perfect duty [is] one that admits no exception in favor of inclination” (Kant (1996a), 4:421n.), the strong implication being that imperfect duties do admit exceptions in favour of inclination. The adoption of the end of beneficence, however, is, it seems, a strict duty, and the maxim of ends that leads to its adoption is therefore not held on account of its capacity to achieve some end.
- 45.
Kant (1996c), 6:4.
- 46.
Kant (1996c), 6:3–4.
- 47.
Kant (1996b), 5:34.
- 48.
Kant (1996a), 4: 400–401.
- 49.
Kant (1996a), 4:400.
- 50.
Though, of course, in so far as that same type of situation is also grasped under an O-aspect, it will in addition be grasped as orectically related to the object of some empirical incentive .
- 51.
See, e.g., Kant (1998), A104.
- 52.
Williams (1981).
- 53.
Hume (1978), Book II, Section III.
- 54.
Kant (1996a), 4:447–448.
- 55.
Kant (1996a), 4:403.
- 56.
The non-good-willed agent will likewise encounter the situation as demanding a certain response, but will not take that D-aspect seriously. That is, she will not take the incentive that manifests itself in that D-aspect as a reason to take somebody’s preventably drowning as a reason to save him or her, even though she may well take the situation’s simultaneously appearing under some O-aspect as such a reason.
- 57.
Kant (1996a), 4:402.
- 58.
Williams (1985), p. 190.
- 59.
- 60.
McDowell (1998a).
- 61.
Williams (1978), p. 64.
- 62.
Her coming to hold that maxim on moral grounds may involve her adopting it, or it may involve her coming now to hold it on moral grounds, whereas previously it had incorporated an empirical incentive.
- 63.
Kant (1996a), 4:414n.
- 64.
Kant (1996a), 4:438.
- 65.
Wood (1999), p. 116.
- 66.
O’Neill (1989). O’Neill also thinks that the two formulations are intensionally equivalent. This is not a conclusion that I am concerned either to embrace or to reject here.
- 67.
Williams (1973), p. 260.
- 68.
Horricks (1995), p. 242.
- 69.
- 70.
It is worth noting, in passing, that not everybody reads Plato in quite this way. For example, John McDowell , in McDowell (1998b), p. 73, records the following view of the Platonic notion of the Good:
The remoteness of the Form of the Good is a metaphorical version of the thesis that value is not in the world …. The point of the metaphor is the colossal difficulty of attaining a capacity to cope clear-sightedly with the ethical reality that is part of our world.
Kant, as I will show in my Conclusion, would agree that a proper relationship with “the ethical reality that is part of our world” is both achieved through a certain clarity of vision, and a hard-won prize.
- 71.
Kant (1996a), 4:403–404.
- 72.
Kant (1996a), 4:398–390.
- 73.
Kant (1996b), 5:30.
- 74.
I am consciously employing a rather broad brush approach here, in order to give a general sense of Kant’s position. That general sense, if it is to prove acceptable, will stand in need of considerable refinement. It would, of course, be unrealistic to suppose that we always correctly identify the D- or L-aspects of any situation that we come across. For one thing, to be correct in this way requires us first of all correctly to identify the type of situation we are in, and this is something that we do not always do. We may, for example, find ourselves confronted with somebody who badly needs emotional support, but be too self-absorbed even to notice.
- 75.
If this position is to appear defensible, an incentive must not be identified with any particular practical aspects of any particular types of situation. For example, a desire to appear heroic is still a desire to appear heroic even when it does not manifest itself in an O-aspect of the type of situation in which someone is drowning (though it must manifest itself in the O-aspect of at least one type of situation that is orectically related to the state of affairs of the agent appearing heroic).
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Herissone-Kelly, P. (2018). Incentives, Practical Aspects, and Bare Situational Reasons. In: Kant on Maxims and Moral Motivation. Studies in German Idealism, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05572-1_6
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