Abstract
Kant’s philosophy stands as a unified body of thought. The arguments Kant set out regarding international peace formed an integral component of the exposition of the fundamental principles of law, state and government that comprise his political philosophy. In expounding the principles of law, state and government, Kant appealed to the more abstract principles of human practical reason whose analysis was central to his moral thought. In turn, Kant’s arguments regarding the nature of practical reason followed from, and complemented, the arguments regarding human reason and understanding in their theoretical employment that he set out in the Critique of Pure Reason.
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Notes and References
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edition with text revised and variant readings by P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Cited hereafter as Treatise.
David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals (posthumous edition of 1777), ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edition with text revised and notes by P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 5–165. Cited hereafter as Enquiry.
Hume, Enquiry, Section IV, Part I, pp. 25–6.
In Hume’s view, reasoning about causes and effects was reasoning based in customary expectations deriving from regularities among impressions and ideas. For Hume’s arguments here, see: Treatise, I.III. Likewise, Hume argued that the sense of the continuous and distinct existence of bodies derived from a coherence and constancy among impressions. Treatise, I.IV.II.
In this connection, see Kant’s discussion of the principle of the permanence of substance, the principle of succession in time according to the law of causality, and the principle of co-existence according to the law of reciprocity or community. CPureR, I: ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Elements’, Part II: ‘Transcendental Logic’, Division I: ‘Transcendental Analytic’, Book II: ‘Analytic of Principles’, Chapter II, Part 3: ‘Analogies of Experience’.
The specific arguments Kant examined, and refuted, were the ontological, cosmological and physico-theological proofs for the existence of God. See: CPureR, I.II, Division II: ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, Book II: ‘The Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason’, Chapter III.
For Kant’s statement of the third antinomy of pure reason, and his discussion of the contradiction between freedom and determinism, see: CPureR, I.II.II.II.II., Section 2: ‘Third Antinomy’; I.II.II.II.II., Part III: ‘Solution of the Cosmological Idea of Totality in the Derivation of Cosmical Events from their Causes’.
For Kant’s discussion of freedom, God and immortality as postulates of pure practical reason, see: CPracR, Part I: ‘Elements of Pure Practical Reason’, Book II: ‘Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason’, Chapter II.
For Hume on reason as the slave of the passions, see: Treatise, Book II: ‘Of the Passions’, Part III, Section III, p. 415.
For Hume’s explanation as to why morality was not to be thought of as consisting in any matters of fact that could be discovered by the reason and understanding, and his explanation as to why no proposition asserting an ought, or an ought not, could be derived or inferred from a proposition asserting an is or an is not, see: Treatise, Book III: ‘Of Morals’, Part I, Section I, especially pp. 468–70.
For example, Hume allowed that reason served to discover the relation between particular objects and the states of pain and pleasure they engendered in the human agent. However, he still insisted that reason alone could never be a motive to any action of the will, and that reason could never oppose the passions in the direction of the will. For Hume’s arguments here, see: Treatise, II.III.III.
The classic work in the philosophy of utilitarianism is Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780). For his statement of the principle of utility as a principle of morals and legislation relating to the promotion of the welfare or happiness of the individual, and of the community as a whole, see: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1970), Chapter 1.
For Kant’s explanation of the basis of these moral duties in the practical principles given in the idea of the categorical imperative, see: FPMM, II, pp. 39–41, 47–9.
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cited hereafter as PR.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Mill, Collected Works, Volume 10: Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 203–59.
For Hegel’s discussion of this defect of Kant’s ethics, see especially: PR, Part II: ‘Morality’, Section 3: ‘The Good and the Conscience’, subsection 135, pp. 162–3. For Mill’s view of the matter, see: Utilitarianism, Chapter 1, p. 207.
Nations, see the Preamble and Articles 55, 56, 62, 68 and 76. For the text of the Charter, see: Basic Documents in International Law, ed. Ian Brownlie, 4th edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 1–35. 28. For the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see: Brownlie (ed.), Basic Documents in International Law, pp. 255–61. For the main source materials for current human rights law, see: Basic Documents on Human Rights, ed. Ian Brownlie, 3rd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). On the international law of human rights generally, see: Human Rights in International Law: Legal and Policy Issues, ed. Theodor Meron, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960).
For Kant’s discussion of the heteronomy of the will as the source of all spurious principles of morality, and his classification of these principles, see: FPMM, II, pp. 59–64. Regarding the idea of the heteronomy of the will in Kant’s explanation of the errors of earlier moral philosophers, see: CPracR, I.I.II, pp. 155–6.
For Kant’s discussion of the question of freedom, see: FPMM, Section III: ‘Transition from the Metaphysic of Morals to the Critique of Pure Practical Reason’. See also: CPracR, I.I.I–I: ‘Of the Deduction of the Fundamental Principles of the Pure Practical Reason’, pp. 131–40.
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© 1998 Charles Covell
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Covell, C. (1998). Kant’s Ethics. In: Kant and the Law of Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501867_2
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