Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory (review)

314 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32.'2 APRIL 1994 can attempt an interpretation, one must have the texts, and Lau's texts, though problematic , will serve us well as windows into an offbeat intellectual world that, however vital, left few monuments. APRIL G. SHELFORD Princeton University Thomas E. Hill, Jr. Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, a99~. Pp. vii + 255. Cloth, $36.5o. Paper, $13.95. This book brings together eleven papers on Kantian ethics which Thomas Hill wrote between x971 and 1989. Nine of the eleven deal quite directly with the exegesis of Kantian texts on moral philosophy or the critical exposition of parts of Kantian moral theory. The tenth attempts to apply Kantian theory to a particularly difficult moral problem of a kind it has often been thought Kantian ethics could not handle: how to deal with terrorism and to make the kinds of life and death decisions this sometimes involves. The final paper, "Kantian Constructivism in Ethics," is about Rawls as much as Kant, and reflects on the affinities between Rawls's "constructivist" project in ethics and the Kantian roots of Rawls's theory. If there is a point of focus for Hill's interpretation of Kant, and I think there is, it is one suggested by the title Hill has given to his book. The basis of Kant's ethics, in Hill's view, is a certain conception of rational agency, which gives rise to a fundamental moral fact: that every rational agent possesses an absolute incomparable worth or dignity. The first essay introduces us to the conception of rational agency by exhibiting it in a largely nonmoral or premoral application, to hypothetical imperatives. This has the function both of introducing us to the more general conception of radonal agency of which moral agency is an aspect, and of showing us what is distinctive about moral agency on Kant's theory. A fuller account of Kant's theory of practical reasoning, one stressing the distinctiveness of categorical imperatives, and the distinctiveness of the reasons attaching to them, is given later, in Essays 6 and 7. Meanwhile, Essays 2 and 3 deal, respectively, with the two of Kant's formulations of the moral law which Hill thinks have the greatest theoretical power: the formula of humanity as an end in itself (which in another essay Hill also christens the "dignity principle"), and the formula of the kingdom of ends. Hill deemphasizes the formula of universal law; his version of Kantian theory is not one in which we spend our time formulating maxims, universalizing them, and testing the results for willability without contradiction. Hill sees the formula of universal law as expressing a certain aspect of the Kantian idea of autonomy--though the Kantian notion of autonomy, as Hill shows in Essay 6, is not the one that usually goes by that name in present-day moral philosophy . But the central idea in Kantian ethics for him is the value of the rational agent as an end in itself. Another notable theme in the book, developed most in Essays 8 and 9, is that Kant's views about moral credit and desert--Hill argues convincingly--are quite different from what popular conceptions of Kant usually take them to be. For instance, Kant has BOOK REVIEWS $15 a place for what moral philosophers now call "supererogation," even if he conceives it somewhat differendy from most of our contemporaries. Thus in Kant's theory the fact that an act involves special self-sacrifice has no special weight in determining whether it is supererogatory. Moreover, despite Kant's notorious reputation for rigorism, Hill argues that he regards the essential worth of persons (their dignity) as quite independent of the moral worth of their actions or the virtuousness or viciousness of their characters. And although Kant's theory of punishment is certainly retributivist, his conception of penal law is primarily concerned with the function of punishment in deterring wrong external acts and is not concerned at all with apportioning happiness to moral desert. This book will be useful to beginning students of the Groundwork as well as to Kant specialists. Perhaps because the...