Kantian Ethics (review)

Kantian Ethics aims to develop a defensible theory of ethics on the basis of Kantian principles. Its primary focus is Kantian ethics, not Kant scholarship or interpretation. The book fulfills a promise of Wood’s earlier book, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, 1999), by developing a Kantian conception of virtue and theory of moral duties in greater detail, and it goes beyond Wood’s previous work on Kant’s ethics in offering extended treatments of substantive moral issues, such as social justice, sexual morality, punishment, lying, consequentialism, personhood, and the status of non-rational animals.

Acknowledging that his reading of Kant is now even further from traditional interpretations than it previously was, Wood contends that it is nevertheless “closer to the truth” (ix–x). He aims to correct what he takes to be some serious misinterpretations of Kant’s views and, in setting the record straight, to provide for us “a better understanding of Kant’s own thoughts” (2). Some familiar points that Wood rejects are the ideas that Kant’s moral psychology involves a sharp dualism between nature and freedom, and that he was unconcerned with the empirical nature of human beings and human history, regarding such issues as entirely irrelevant to morality. One intriguing theme developed over the course of Kantian Ethics that will be of widespread interest to contemporary moral theorists is that the so-called “constructivist” approach to Kant inaugurated by John Rawls and advanced by Rawls’ students over the past several decades is mistaken, misunderstanding Kant’s views about both the methods and aims of moral theory.

Kantian Ethics is an immensely rich and rewarding book, one that anyone interested in Kant’s ethics and the history of ethics will benefit from studying carefully. Wood sets out a number of important insights about Kant’s account of morality and moral value, he raises a host of well-founded objections to some standard readings of Kant, and his provocative claim that constructivism gets Kant wrong in fundamental ways should embolden a new generation of Kant interpreters to consider alternative approaches to Kantian ethics. Finally, Wood makes a compelling case that Kant is a more appealing moral philosopher than commonly supposed and that, when correctly (or more sympathetically) understood, his views are more defensible than they are often portrayed.

Since Wood is relentless in his repudiation of the metaethical antirealism endorsed by many contemporary Kantians, some mention of this theme of the book is in order. In general, Wood characterizes the constructivist views he opposes as holding that “moral truth” has to be “constructed” by us, by appeal to certain “procedures” supplied by the formulations of the categorical imperative (107). For Wood, by contrast, the moral law is grounded in the very dignity of rational nature, and no act of will is necessary to give rational nature this worth, because such worth belongs to it essentially or intrinsically (112–13). Wood thinks Kant is best understood as a realist about the value of humanity, insisting that, on the best interpretation of many passages in which Kant discusses the ultimate value of humanity, we find “as unequivocal an assertion of metaethical realism as you could ask for” (112).

Part of Wood’s complaint about constructivism appears to be the model of ethical theory with which it is associated. Wood claims that the “correct standard for an ethical theory is whether it gets things right at the level of basic principles and values” (12). On his reading, the fundamental value in Kantian ethics is not the good will or the moral worth of acting from the motive of duty but the dignity of rational nature (94). One method for assessing such a proposal about fundamental value would be to adopt what Wood calls the “standard” or “dominant” model of ethical theory (43–44). This model, which he associates with Sidgwick’s rational intuitionism and Rawls’s doctrine of reflective equilibrium, assesses accounts about basic values based on the degree to which they coherently explain our intuitions (44). Though this standard model does...