Anthropology From a Metaphysical Point of View

1. introduction1

there has been no lack of recent discussion of how feeling and desire can be considered more central to Immanuel Kant’s ethical theory than a 200 year old caricature of the austere Prussian moralist would lead one to believe.² But despite the plethora of literature which opens up the possibilities for the roles feeling can play on a Kantian account of morality, there has been an odd refusal to accept the possibility that feeling could play a specifically motivational role in moral action. Barbara Herman, for example, notes the following:

Whether any emotion could give an agent a moral interest in an action is a question that must look first to an account of the emotions (of what it is to say of a motive that it is an emotion). For Kant, the answer is clearly no; he holds that no emotion or inclination can make the moral law the determining ground of the will, since they determine the will according to the principle of happiness.

(Herman, 5: n. 6)

Rejection of a motivational role specifically for the moral feeling of respect is claimed also by Paul Guyer:

One must always keep in mind . . . Kant’s insistence that this [moral] feeling is neither the source of the content or validity of the moral law, nor our motive for adherence to it, but strictly the effect of our adherence to the moral law motivated by our recognition of the law itself: ‘This feeling (under the name of moral feeling) is therefore merely effected through reason. It does not serve for the evaluation of actions, nor certainly for the grounding of the objective law of morality itself.’

(Practical Reason 5:76) (Guyer, 360)³

A desire to maintain a clear distinction between Kant’s theory and a more “empirical” approach to motivation appears to be the underlying concern which leads commentators to hesitate in granting feeling a motivational role, either in moral action or in action more generally. Marcia Baron articulates this concern most clearly:

The problem is that the term ‘motive’ suggests causation, as if the motive of duty or a desire to help another were a force within us that causes us to act accordingly. According to this picture, one does x because one is moved or prompted or impelled to do x. If one is moved both to do x and not to do x, the stronger, more forceful motive wins out . . . This is a familiar picture of agency from the empiricist tradition. Kant’s theory of agency is very different. Our actions are not the result of a desire or some other incentive that impels us. An incentive can move us to act only if we let it . . . . We are not (except perhaps in pathological cases, where agency is severely impaired) overcome by desires.

(Baron, 189)⁴

It would seem that the consensus in recent Kant literature about the limits of the inclusion of feeling are clear: although there are a whole variety of ways in which feeling can be shown to be central in moral judgment and action, no specifically motivational role for feeling can be claimed. But on what basis has this limit been set? For the most part, these commentators either assume the truth of this limit, or rely on traditional understandings of the constraints of Kant’s moral theory in order to make their claim. It is odd that commentators who have so successfully challenged old stereotypes of Kant in other areas end up relying upon a traditional account of Kant’s commitment to a metaphysics of morals, free from anthropological assumptions, in order to excise any motivational role for feeling or desire⁵ in moral action. In this article, I will clear the space for investigating an alternate understanding of Kant’s theory of moral motivation which would allow for the involvement of feeling by reviewing the arguments against allowing feeling a motivational role and showing that they are inadequate; and then providing an account of Kant’s moral feeling of respect which reveals this feeling as adequate for inclusion as a...