Elements of Wolff and Crusius in Kant’s Concept of Self-Legislation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Autonomy Without Paradox: Kant, Self-Legislation and the Moral Law
Philosophers' Imprint, 2019
Within Kantian ethics and Kant scholarship, it is widely assumed that autonomy consists in the self-legislation of the principle of morality (the Moral Law). In this paper, we challenge this view on both textual and philosophical grounds. We argue that Kant never unequivocally claims that the Moral Law is self-legislated and that he is not philosophically committed to this claim by his overall conception of morality. Instead, the idea of autonomy concerns only substantive moral laws (in the plural), such as the law that one ought not to lie. We argue that autonomy, thus understood, does not have the paradoxical features widely associated with it. Rather, our account highlights a theoretical option that has been neglected in the current debate on whether Kant is best interpreted as a realist or a constructivist, namely that the Moral Law is an a priori principle of pure practical reason that neither requires nor admits of being grounded in anything else.
The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant's Moral Philosophy, 2018
'Autonomy' is originally a political notion. In this chapter, I argue that the political theory Kant defended while he was writing the _Groundwork_ sheds light on the difficulties that are associated with his account of moral autonomy. I argue that Kant's account of the two-tiered structure of political legislation, in his _Feyerabend Lectures on Natural Law_, parallels his distinction between two levels of moral legislation, and that this helps to explain why Kant could regard the notion of 'autonomy' as apt to express the principle of morality---at least in the mid 1780s.
How is moral obligation possible? Kant’s “principle of autonomy” in context.
The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Philosophy, ed. Stefano Bacin and Oliver Sensen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 10-28., 2018
The debates in moral philosophy that took place between the publication of Christian Wolff’s German Ethics (1720) and Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) revolve around the concept of moral obligation. With the “principle of autonomy” (G 4:439), Kant gives these debates an entirely new direction. For the first time in the history of philosophy we find the position put forward that pure reason is the source of “absolute necessity” and of the obligation of the moral law. In this paper Kant’s “principle of autonomy” is situated within the context of the debate concerning the concept of obligation. After a general introduction to this context, I consider how Samuel von Pufendorf and Wolff theorize obligation so as to specify the presuppositions that underlie the debate that took place in the following decades. Among the younger Wolffians, reference will be made to Johann August Eberhard as someone who reacts to new philosophical developments, for which Henry Home, Lord Kames, stands as a representative. Finally, I outline some of the unique characteristics of the Kantian conception of obligation.
Kant’s Threefold Autonomy after theGroundwork
The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant's Moral Philosophy
I argue that Kant's conception of reason's own law-giving and hence of the autonomy of reason was always in the critical period also an account of our own individual law-giving. This is a crucial part of Kant's cosmopolitan conception of philosophy. I also argue that Kant's work in the 1780's and 1790's is importantly devoted to the project of developing an account of our autonomy and its manifestation in sensibility that is able to bring our perception, feeling and desire under the content-determining guise of our self-governance and of reason's and of our own law-giving. Kant is thus able to provide an integrated account of us as human beings and as persons who are also sensible beings embedded in the sensible world with a sense of self that emerges out of our relationship to the world. Section I: Reason's Own Law-Giving and the Critique Kant does not use the term "autonomy" in either of the two editions of The Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787); however Kant already has a conception of reason's own law-giving in its first edition. The Critique is an account of how reason's own law-giving can and must become our own law-giving as we participate in the process of a self-governance that is also the selfgovernance of reason. Such self-governance involves an account of the causal efficacy of ideas and norms. Kant's philosophy from the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (1783) to The Critique of Judgment (1790), The Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and The Conflict of the Faculties (1795) fills a deep lacuna in his original Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787) account of reason's own law-giving, namely, how reason's own and our own law-giving can
The Scope of Autonomy: Kant and the Morality of Freedom
Autonomy is a key concept in contemporary moral philosophy with deep roots in the history of the subject. However, there is still no agreed view about the correct way to formulate an account of autonomy that adequately captures both our capacity for self-determination and our responsiveness to reasons. In this book I develop a theory of autonomy that is Kantian in orientation but which engages closely with recent arguments about agency, morality, and practical reasoning.
Self-Legislation and the Apriority of the Moral Law
Philosophia, 2023
Marcus Willaschek and I have argued against the widespread assumption that Kant claims the Moral Law-the supreme principle of morality-is (or must be regarded as) 'self-legislated'. We argue that Kant instead describes the Moral Law as an a priori principle of the will. We also argue that his conception of autonomy concerns not the Moral Law but substantive moral laws such as the law that requires promoting the happiness of others. In the present essay, I respond to the commentary by Alyssa Bernstein and Christoph Hanisch. In response to Bernstein, I clarify the relation between our interpretation of Kant and those proposed by John Rawls and Allen Wood. In response to Hanisch, I argue, among other things, that Kant's defense of the thesis that the Moral Law is an a priori principle of pure practical reason does not mean that practical reasoning and reasons-based action are impossible without it. It means rather that morally good and morally evil reasons-based action are impossible without it.