Abstract
Kantians decide what to do by deciding what you ought to do. Wood argues that Kantian ethics proposes no discursive criterion of right action. The testing of maxims for universalizability represents only a way of judging whether actions are permissible exceptions to already recognized duties. A more crucial concept is provided by conscience.
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Notes
- 1.
Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
- 2.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2:386.
- 3.
Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 7.
- 4.
Parfit, On What Matters, 2:408.
- 5.
For more on this, see Allen W. Wood, The Free Development of Each: Studies in Freedom, Right and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 2.
- 6.
See Allen W. Wood, Kantian Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 6.
- 7.
See Wood, Kantian Ethics, ch. 7.
- 8.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ethica philosophica (Magdeburg: Hemmerde, 1751).
- 9.
See Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 13–15, 23–37.
- 10.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 2nd ed., ed. George Sher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 20.
- 11.
See Wood, Kantian Ethics, ch. 14.
- 12.
For interpretations of Kant that take this position, see Faviola Rivera-Castro, “Kantian Ethical Duties,” Kantian Review 11 (March 2006): 78–101; and Jens Timmermann, Kant’s “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals”: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 13.
Mill, Utilitarianism, 4.
- 14.
G. W. F. Hegel, Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 2:465–66.
- 15.
Franz Brentano, The Foundation and Construction of Ethics: Compiled from His Lectures on Practical Philosophy by Franziska Mayer-Hillebrand, trans. Elizabeth Hughes Schneewind (Abingdon: Routledge, 1973), 26. For a discussion of Hegel’s bogus counterexample, see Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 159–60; and Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 87. For a discussion of Brentano’s, see Timmermann, Kant’s “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals,” 159; and Günther Patzig, “Der Gedanke eines kategorischen Imperativs,” Archiv für Philosophie 6 (1956): 85–87.
- 16.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 316.
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Wood, A.W. (2017). How a Kantian Decides What to Do. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_12
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