Robert Stern , Understanding Moral Obligation. Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard . Reviewed by (original) (raw)

The Problem of Obligation, the Finite Rational Will, and Kantian Value Realism

Inquiry 55 (2012): 567-83

Robert Stern's Understanding Moral Obligation is a remarkable achievement, representing an original reading of Kant's contribution to modern moral philosophy and the legacy he bequeathed to his later-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century successors in the German tradition. On Stern's interpretation, it was not the threat to autonomy posed by value realism, but the threat to autonomy posed by the obligatory nature of morality that led Kant to develop his critical moral theory grounded in the concept of the self-legislating moral agent. Accordingly, Stern contends that Kant was a moral realist of sorts, holding certain substantive views that are best characterized as realist commitments about value. In this paper, I raise two central objections to Stern's reading of Kant. The first objection concerns what Stern identifies as Kant's solution to the problem of moral obligation. Whereas Stern sees the distinction between the infinite will and the finite will as resolving the problem of moral obligation, I argue that this distinction merely explains why moral obligations necessarily take the form of imperatives for us imperfect human beings, but does not solve the deeper problem concerning the obligatory nature of morality-why we should take moral norms to be supremely authoritative laws that override all other norms based on our non-moral interests. The second objection addresses Stern's claim that Kantian autonomy is compatible with value realism. Although this is an idea with which many contemporary readers will be sympathetic, I suggest that the textual evidence actually weighs in favor of constructivism.

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.