Abstract
Although Kant famously calls his anthropology “pragmatic,” one ongoing debate is whether or not there also exists a distinctively moral anthropology within his pragmatic anthropology. In my contribution, I will begin by surveying the evidence and arguments on both sides of this important controversy before turning to a defense of my own position: If we are careful readers, we will find the rudiments of a moral anthropology within Kant’s lectures on anthropology, albeit one that is not fully articulated or developed. But it is important, indeed, necessary, to take note of these incompletely developed hints of moral anthropology in order both to make sense out of Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole as well as to defend his ethics against a long line of Hegel-inspired criticisms that accuse it of empty formalism.
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Notes
- 1.
Note: The English translations of Kant’s writings are mine.
- 2.
For discussion of some additional obstacles to finding “the second part” of morals, “philosophia moralis applicata, to which the empirical principles belong” (V-Mo/Mron II 29: 599), see Louden (2011: 50–54).
- 3.
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment seat;
But there is Neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
(Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” 1892—see Kipling [2018]).
- 4.
I discuss this topic in more detail in “Humans-Only Norms: An Unexpected Kantian Story” (paper presented at the conference on “Dimensions of Normativity: Kant on Morality, Legality, and Humanity,” Purdue University, USA, February 2018).
- 5.
I first developed this idea of a moral map after reading Kaulbach (1975).
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Louden, R.B. (2018). The Moral Dimensions of Kant’s Anthropology. In: Lorini, G., Louden, R. (eds) Knowledge, Morals and Practice in Kant’s Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98726-2_7
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