Kant on Moral Sensibility and Moral Motivation

Nobody can or ever will comprehend how the understanding should have a motivating power; it can admittedly judge, but to give this judgment power so that it becomes a motive able to impel the will to performance of an action—to understand this is the philosopher’s stone.

—Lectures on Ethics (MPC, AA 27:1428).

Introduction

in contrast to his rationalist predecessors, Kant argues that feeling plays a positive role in moral life. Yet the exact nature of this role is far from clear. As much as Kant repeats that moral motivation must proceed from a “feeling of respect” (Gefühl der Achtung), he maintains with equal insistence that to act out of respect for the law is simply to recognize its value and authority. In what way, then, is respect for the law a feeling? And what place does this feeling have—if any—in Kant’s ethics?

Despite the large body of secondary literature devoted to this topic, the details of Kant’s position still remain elusive.¹ In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), for example, Kant argues that our recognition of the moral law must elicit both painful and pleasurable feelings in us. It must be painful, he explains, insofar as the moral law limits our egoistic tendencies of choice, but also pleasurable, insofar as we see that this limitation is self-imposed (KpV, AA 5:73; 5:81). On reflection, though, it is unclear how these feelings could properly relate to our recognition of the moral law itself—in Kant’s terms, they may be “pathological”—so it is unclear how they could serve to motivate us to act from duty. As we shall see, commentators have left this skeptical worry unresolved, either because they deny moral feeling plays an active role in moral motivation, or because they only consider that role from the standpoint of a “battle of forces” model.

My aim in this paper is to advance a novel reading of Kant’s account, one that considers the concept of moral feeling from the agent’s own point of view.² The discussion divides into five sections. In §1, I begin with a sketch of Kant’s early struggle with these issues, reviewing some of his essays, letters, and lectures from the 1760s and 1770s. In §2, I explain in greater detail the skeptical worry just mentioned, what I call motivational effect skepticism. In §3, I turn to my central text, Chapter III of the second Critique, clarifying what Kant means by a “feeling” (in §3.1), and then emphasizing the importance of his distinction between “self-love” (Eigenliebe) and “self-conceit” (Eigendünkel) (in §3.2). In §4, I reconstruct Kant’s account from Chapter III, showing how the negative and positive aspects of moral feeling relate to our recognition of the moral law. Lastly, in §5, I show how my reconstruction brings a new perspective to a long-standing dispute over intellectualist and affectivist accounts of moral motivation.

1. background: the “philosopher’s stone”

While it may be an exaggeration to say Kant went through a sentimentalist phase, in the “Prize Essay” written in 1762 he does claim that our judgments of the good derive from more basic, unanalyzable feelings; and he praises Francis Hutcheson for “providing us with a starting point from which to develop some excellent observations” under the name ‘moral feeling’ (DG, AA 2:300). Yet the essay ends on a tentative note. Kant says we do not yet know “whether it is merely the faculty of cognition, or whether it is feeling (the first inner ground of the faculty of desire) which decides its first principles” (DG, AA 2:300).

Kant seems to lean toward a sentimentalist view in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, written in 1763, when he says that virtue arises from a “consciousness of a feeling that lives in every human breast,” that is, “the feeling of the beauty and the dignity of human nature” (GSE, AA 2:217). But right before saying this he asserts that virtue must be based on “principles.” This indecisiveness runs...