Abstract
The concept of moral obligation is central to Kant’s ethics. According to the Anscombian reading of Kant’s ethics, this concept is conceptually confused and, therefore, corrupts much, if not all, of what Kant has to say about ethics. This critique of moral obligation forms the cornerstone of the Anscombian reading of Kant’s ethics, which is why I need to address it directly. Accordingly, I devote this chapter to dealing with the classical source for this critique of moral obligation, Elizabeth Anscombe ’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958). My main contention regarding Anscombe’s critique of “moral obligation” is that she and Kant are working with two very different understandings of moral obligation, and, therefore, Anscombe’s criticism of the modern sense of “moral” obligation does not apply to Kant. More specifically, I argue that for Kant moral obligation is not some irreducible, inexplicable metaethical concept, leftover from a divine command theory of ethics and robbed of its metaphysical underpinnings; instead, I argue, we should understand Kant’s concept of moral obligation as his way of acknowledging how human beings—finite, imperfect beings that we are—experience the normative constraints that an objective account of human goodness makes on us, namely, as something with which, in some sense, we do not want to comply.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Perhaps the other most influential critic of Kant’s ethics is Bernard Williams (1985). Williams is influenced by Anscombe’s work but develops his criticisms of Kant by examining what he takes to be Kant’s understanding of “morality.” For responses to Williams ’ version of the Anscombian reading, see Stephen Darwall (1987) and Korsgaard (1996a)
- 2.
Given the influence of Anscombe’s criticisms of the modern concept of moral obligation, it is somewhat surprising that few defenders of Kant’s ethics address them. For example, although J.B. Schneewind (1997) and Allen Wood (1999, 2008) acknowledge Anscombe’s criticism of the concept of moral obligation, neither of them engage in an extended defense of Kant’s use of the concept.
- 3.
Kant believed that one should never lie, that lying always constitutes a violation of the moral law. For Kant on lying, see “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropic Concerns” (1797) and the Metaphysics of Morals (6:429–431). There have been many attempts to defend Kant’s position on lying, often by interpreting his moral theory as at odds with his explicit universal prohibitions on lying. See, for example, Allen W. Wood (2011) and Sally Sedgwick (1991). It is worth noting that Anscombe herself believed that it is always wrong to lie.
- 4.
Anne Margaret Baxley (2010) explains maxims thusly: “A maxim is a subjective principle of action according to which an agent tends to act in relevantly similar situations, expressing a generalized intent or policy of action that can be characterized by the formula: ‘When in S-type situation, perform Y-type actions for purpose P’” (22). On the so-called universalizability test, the literature is too vast to summarize in a note. For an example of someone who tries to defend Kant’s universalizability test of maxims, see Korsgaard (1996a). For an example of someone who downplays the importance of the universalizability test in favor of other formulations of Kant’s categorical imperative see Wood (1999, 2008).
- 5.
The same is true of Peter Geach (1969), who defends Anscombe’s criticism of “moral” obligation.
- 6.
J. B. Schneewind (1997) gives the definitive historical account of this debate.
- 7.
Agam-Segal (2013) agrees with me that Anscombe most likely did not have Kant in mind when she formulated her criticisms, but he thinks they apply nonetheless.
- 8.
Korsgaard and Wilson attempt to defend Kant from Anscombe’s criticisms while Alvarez & Ridley argue that Korsgaard misinterprets Anscombe and, therefore, does not defend Kant successfully from Anscombe’s critique of the modern sense of “moral.” Darwall argues that Anscombe’s critique can be “turned on its head” (115) by relying on his account of the second-person standpoint (i.e., the idea that the normative force of obligation proceeds from the demand that others make on oneself). For a critique of Korsgaard’s response to Anscombe, see Agam-Segal (2013). For a critique of Darwall, see Stern (2015, 243–263).
- 9.
In this respect, it seems that some of Charles Pigden’s (1988) criticisms of Anscombe miss their mark.
- 10.
There is not enough space to give a representative list of the thinkers who have sought to defend Kant’s ethics from misreadings, even if I were to limit myself to the last twenty-five years. Nonetheless, some of the most influential interpreters of Kant have been Allison (1990), Baron (1995), Baxley (2010), Guyer (2000), Herman (1993), Korsgaard (1996a, b), O’Neill (1989), Rawls (2000), and Wood (1999, 2008).
- 11.
- 12.
I do not mean to imply that no one has recognized this distinction. Baxley (2010) and Wood (2008), for example, draw attention to it in ways that point to its importance for understanding Kant’s moral theory. Rather, I mean to say that very few people have emphasized the distinction sufficiently. One exception to this is Stern (2012), on whom I rely heavily in the current section.
- 13.
I realize that this passage, and others that I shall cite, raise many questions about the cogency of Kant’s concept of God, particularly in light of more traditional, orthodox understandings of God found in Christianity and Judaism (e.g., is God a moral agent? Does it make sense to say that God acts freely? Etc.). These are important questions, but they do not need to be answered in order for me to make my argument about Kant’s understanding of moral obligation. Hence, I set them aside.
- 14.
Cf. LE 29: 604: “In the Gospel we also find an ideal, namely that of holiness. It is that state of mind from which an evil desire never arises. God alone is holy, and man can never become so, but the ideal is good.” One philosopher who picks up on this line of thinking in Kant is William P. Alston (1990).
- 15.
Kant, of course, recognizes that there are other-regarding emotions such as sympathy, but he thinks that these are only genuinely other-regarding after we have done the work of cultivating them under the guidance of our reason and willing, putting these emotions under what Kant calls “the discipline of reason” (CPrR 5:82). Prior to such work, these emotions may seem other-regarding but Kant thinks that they really are primarily expressions of one’s self-love.
- 16.
Cf. G 4:424: “If we now attend to ourselves in any transgression of a duty, we find that we do not really will that our maxim should become a universal law, since that is impossible for us, but that the opposite of our maxim should instead remain a universal law, only we take the liberty of making an exception to it for ourselves (or just this once) to the advantage of our inclination.”
- 17.
Some might say that were Melinda more virtuous, she would be satisfied by doing her work and keeping her promise. Kant would not disagree with such a claim, but what I am concerned to emphasize at present is that on Kant’s view human beings can never completely exterminate the desire to pursue one’s own well-being over-and-against what is truly and objectively good.
- 18.
This propensity will be the subject of Chap. 3.
- 19.
There seems to be an obvious problem with Kant’s insistence that the moral law applies to all rational beings alike, namely, that it stands to reason that what is good for human beings would not be good for a being such as God. I think that this problem can be addressed by keeping in mind that, according to Kant, we do not determine what is good for humans merely by reference to some formal law of practical reason. We also, on his view, need to take into account the particular constitution and circumstances of human beings in order to discover what is good for them, what is required of them in order for them to act well. As he writes in his introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, “a metaphysics of morals cannot dispense with principles of application, and we shall often have to take as our object the particular nature of human beings, which is cognized only by experience, in order to show in it what can be inferred from universal moral principles” (6:217). Accordingly, although the moral law in principle applies to all rational beings insofar as they are rational, this law does not yield content until it is applied to the nature of the rational being in question, which, in our case, is human beings.
- 20.
Cf. MM 6:222: “An imperative is a practical rule by which an action in itself contingent is made necessary. An imperative differs from a practical law in that a law indeed represents an action as necessary but takes no account of whether this action already inheres by an inner necessity in the acting subject (as in a holy being) or whether it is contingent (as in the human being); for where the former is the case there is no imperative.” For an account of Kant’s indebtedness to Baumgarten with respect to the concept of necessitation, see Clemens Schwaiger (2009).
- 21.
Cf. G 4:397.
- 22.
To foreshadow that discussion, insofar as Kant’s practical philosophy distinguishes between juridical lawgiving and ethical lawgiving, it allows for a distinction between the legal problem of sexual objectification (i.e., how can the rights of sexual partners be protected) and the moral problem of sexual objectification (i.e., how can the dignity of sexual partners be acknowledged and respected). Kant’s account of marriage is meant to be a solution to the former, not the latter.
- 23.
It is under the heading of right that Kant recognizes what Anscombe characterizes as the everyday, unproblematic uses of “duty” and “obligation.”
- 24.
- 25.
It is telling that Kant consistently maintains that human beings have no obligation to pursue their own happiness, since “his own happiness is an end that every human being has (by virtue of the impulses of nature), but this end can never without self-contradiction be regarded as a duty. What everyone already wants unavoidably, of his own accord, does not come under the concept of duty, which is constraint to an end adopted reluctantly” (MM 6:386). Cf. CPrR 5:37.
- 26.
I have more to say about Kant’s moral realism in Sect. 2.3.2.
- 27.
Kant readily admits that we can think of our moral duties as divine commands (R 6:153), but he does not think that this admission commits him to a divine command theory of ethics. For a good discussion of Kant on duties as divine commands, see Wood (1999, 160–161, 317–320).
- 28.
Cf. 5:33: “If, therefore, the matter of volition, which can be nothing other than the object of a desire that is connected with the law, enters into the practical law as a condition of its possibility, there results heteronomy of choice, namely dependence upon the natural law of following some impulse or inclination, and the will does not give itself the law but only the precept for rationally following pathological law.”
- 29.
According to Stern (2012, 24–25), “at the centre of Kant’s conception of the autonomy/heteronomy distinction is a contrast between reason controlling the will on the one hand, and reason acting as a ‘handmaid’ to achieve some end given to it by desire on the other.” Baxley (2010, 58) claims that “according to Kant’s particular conception of autonomy, the laws we give ourselves are prescriptions of our own reason, through which we constrain ourselves in virtue of the recognition of their validity for all rational agents.”
- 30.
Cf. Wood (2008, 112–113): “Strictly speaking, our own will is neither the legislator nor the author of the moral law. (To speak of it in either of these ways is at most merely an appropriate way of considering or regarding the matter.)”
- 31.
Consider, e.g., the passage from the Groundwork at the start of this subsection. There, Kant says that the will “must be viewed as” giving the law to itself and that it “can regard itself” as its author.
- 32.
Cf. G 4:433–434: “A rational being belongs as a member to the kingdom of ends when he gives universal laws in it but is also himself subject to these laws. He belongs to it as sovereign when, as lawgiving, he is not subject to the will of any other. A rational being must always regard himself as lawgiving in a kingdom of ends possible through freedom of the will, whether as a member or as sovereign. He cannot, however, hold the position of sovereign merely by the maxims of his will but only in case he is a completely independent being, without needs and with unlimited resources adequate to his will”; CPrR 5:82–83; and LE 27: 263–264: “In the divine will the subjective laws of that will are identical with the objective laws of the universally good will, but God’s subjective law is no ground for morality; it is good and holy because His will is in conformity with this objective law. So the question of morality has no relation at all to subjective grounds; it can only be framed on objective grounds alone.”
- 33.
- 34.
- 35.
- 36.
And, so, neither can I explain the varieties of Kantian constructivism and realism. See Galvin (2011).
- 37.
Stern (2012, 29–31) cites a third piece of evidence concerning Kant’s discussion of our ability to take a moral interest (G 4:449–450).
- 38.
Cf. G 4:396: “the true vocation of reason must be to produce a will that is good, not perhaps as a means to other purposes, but good in itself, for which reason was absolutely necessary. This will need not, because of this, be the sole and complete good, but it must still be the highest good and the condition of every other, even of all demands for happiness.”
- 39.
Cf. G 4:428: “But suppose there were something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth, something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws; then in it, and in it alone, would lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative, that is, of a practical law. Now I say that the human being and in general every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion.” Hills (2008, 190), commenting on this passage, concludes that “Kant could hardly make his views any clearer: the existence of rational beings has in itself an absolute value.”
- 40.
One might think that constructivists can equally claim that we are not, on their reading of Kant, the author of the law. But I am not sure that this is true. According to constructivists, we come to recognize our moral duties as a result of the (allegedly best) rational procedure that answers the question, “What should I do?” But this procedure is one that we come to develop (or perhaps discover) and use to construct the law. Hence, it seems to me fair to describe this process of construction as “authoring the law.”
- 41.
Cf. CPrR 5:43.
- 42.
For someone who thinks that one can defend Kant’s ethics while rejecting his dubious metaphysics, see Wood (2008).
- 43.
“A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws (whereas psychological personality is merely the ability to be conscious of one’s identity in different conditions of one’s existence)” (MM 6: 223).
- 44.
Cf. LE 27:510: “if the obligator is personified as an ideal being or moral person, it can be none other than the legislation of reason; this, then, is man considered solely as an intelligible being, who here obligates man as sensory being, and we thus have a relationship of man qua phenomenon towards himself qua noumenon. The situation is similar in obligations towards others.”
References
Agam-Segal, Reshef. 2012. Kant’s Non-Aristotelian Conception of Morality. Southwest Philosophy Review 28 (1): 121–133.
———. 2013. A Splitting “Mind-Ache”: An Anscombian Challenge to Kantian Self-Legislation. Journal of Philosophical Research 38: 43–68.
Allison, Henry E. 1990. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alston, William P. 1990. Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists. In Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy, ed. Michel D. Beaty, 303–325. Southbend: University of Notre Dame Press.
Alvarez, Maria, and Aaron Ridley. 2007. The Concept of Moral Obligation: Anscombe contra Korsgaard. Philosophy 82: 543–552.
Anscombe, G.E.M. 1958. Modern Moral Philosophy. Philosophy 33.124: 1–19.
Arroyo, Christopher. 2011. Freedom and the source of value: Korsgaard and Wood on Kant’s formula of humanity. Metaphilosophy 42 (4): 353–359.
Baron, Marcia W. 1995. Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Baxley, Anne Margaret. 2010. Kant’s Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwall, Stephen L. 1987. Abolishing Morality. Synthese 72: 71–89.
Darwall, Stephen. 2006. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Galvin, Richard. 2011. Rounding up the Usual Suspects: Varieties of Kantian Constructivism in Ethics. The Philosophical Quarterly 61 (242): 16–36.
Geach, Peter. 1969. The Moral Law and the Law of God. In God and the Soul, 2nd ed. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press.
Guyer, Paul. 2000. Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herman, Barbara. 1993. The Practice of Moral Judgment. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Hills, Alison. 2008. Kantian Value Realism. Ratio 21 (2): 182–200.
Kain, Patrick. 2004. Self-Legislation in Kant’s Moral Philosophy. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 86 (3): 257–306.
Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996a. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1996b. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2011. Natural goodness, rightness, and the intersubjectivity of reason: Reply to Arroyo, Cummisky, Moland, and Bird-Pollan. Metaphilosophy 42 (4): 381–394.
Louden, Robert B. 2000. Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Muirhead, J.H. 1932. Rule and End in Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O’Neill, Onora. 1989. Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
Pigden, Charles. 1988. Anscombe on ‘Ought’. Philosophical Quarterly 38 (150): 20–41.
Rawls, John. 2000. In Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Reath, Andrews. 2006. Agency and autonomy in Kant’s moral theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schneewind, J.B. 1997. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwaiger, Clemens. 2009. The theory of obligation in Wolff, Baumgarten, and the early Kant. In Kant’s moral and legal philosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks, Otfried Höffe, and Nicholas Walker, 58–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stern, Robert. 2012. Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2015. Kantian Ethics: Value, Agency, and Obligation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, Eric Entrican. 2008. Kantian Autonomy and the Moral Self. The Review of Metaphysics 62: 355–381.
———. 2009. Is Kant’s Concept of Autonomy Absurd? History of Philosophy Quarterly 26 (2): 159–174.
Wood, Allen W. 1999. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2003. Kant and the Problem of Human Nature. In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain, 38–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2008. Kantian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Arroyo, C. (2017). Finitude & Dependency: Kant’s Conception of Moral Obligation. In: Kant’s Ethics and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate - An Introduction . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55733-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55733-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-55731-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-55733-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)