Download Virtue, Right, and the Cultivation of Autonomy:

Virtue, Right, and the Cultivation of Autonomy:
Kant on the Social and Political Conditions of Agency
Kevin Thompson
DePaul University
What, for Kant, are the social and political conditions necessary for moral cultivation? The
question itself seems ill posed for it is well known that Kant draws a strict separation between
the domains of right (Recht) and virtue (Tugend), between the juridical and the ethical. Though
both purport to be derived ultimately from the moral law, the difference in their respective forms
of lawgiving (Gesetzgebung) seems to set a rigid boundary that precludes any kind of
relationship.1 Duties of virtue, as we know, must be done from duty itself, while fulfilling duties
of right need only conform to duty. What, then, could the formation of a virtuous character have
to do with the rights and obligations that constitute a civil condition?
The answer offered by many of even Kant’s most astute readers is absolutely nothing. Right
is concerned with outer freedom and external constraint, while the focus of virtue is inner
freedom and self-constraint. Moral character is thus not required for a rightful state and,
conversely, a rightful state is not required for its citizens to become morally virtuous. The
question we have sought to pose properly belongs, they say, to Schiller and the classical
republican tradition, not to the modern individualism and deontology that Kant’s practical
philosophy so resolutely embodies.2
In what follows, I shall argue that for all its obviousness this interpretation is nonetheless
profoundly mistaken. Kant’s practical philosophy holds that a specific set of social and political
institutions and practices are necessary—though, to be sure, not sufficient—conditions for the
formation of genuine moral character.3 These institutions and practices comprise what Kant calls
“culture (Kultur)” and they are necessary, on his view, because they establish a space that is
conducive to the cultivation of our rational self-governance that, in turn, lays the foundation for
the formation of a genuinely moral disposition.4 Culture is thus the matrix within which the
domains of right and virtue are brought into systematic relation.
The key to this doctrine, I shall argue, is the distinction Kant draws in the Kritik der
Urteilskraft between the “ultimate end (letzter Zweck) of nature” and the “final end (Endzweck)
of the existence of a world” (KU, AA 05: 429-436). Under this distinction, I shall contend, the
institutions and practices of a rightful condition are shown to be the means needed to cultivate
1
the capacity humans have to set ends generally, the ultimate end of nature, and that this, in turn,
is the condition for the possibility for the formation of genuine moral character, the find end of
the existence of a world itself. To do this, I will take Kant’s account of the obligatory end of selfperfection as a guiding clue into the systematic relationship between virtue, right, agency, and
the regulative principles of teleology.
The paper is divided into three parts. The first examines the obligatory ends of self-perfection
to see how this duty is related to its underlying account of practical agency and the implications
this has for the relationship between right and virtue. The second part offers an interpretation of
the distinction between the ultimate and final ends of nature as the conceptual rubric under which
Kant seeks to understand the development of human agency. Part three concludes by setting out
Kant’s account of culture (Kultur) where he provides his most fully detailed sketch of the social
and political conditions necessary for rational and moral cultivation.
I
It is well known that the centerpiece of the Tugendlehre is the concept of an “end that is, at the
same time, a duty (Zweck, der zugleich Pflicht ist)” and Kant holds that there are two such ends:
one’s own perfection and the happiness of others.5 He divides the obligation to perfect one’s self,
which shall be our focus here, into “natural perfection” and the “cultivation of morality”. The
former, he tells us, refers to the duty that we have to develop our capacities (Vermögen) and
predispositions (Anlagen) for setting and pursuing rational ends in general (whether these be
technical or pragmatic), while the latter requires us to strive to make the moral law alone
sufficient to compel us to fulfill the duties it prescribes. Both duties, Kant tells us, are imperfect
and thus admit of a variety of ways of being fulfilled. But each, nonetheless, requires a definite
regimen of exercises to elicit, mold, and improve their respective powers.
The obligatory end to perfect ourselves will provide us a crucial way into the relationship
between right and virtue. In order to see this, we first need to examine the conceptual framework
that underpins Kant’s delineation of these duties. This is his account of practical agency and it is
the concern of the present section. Kant delineates two distinct layers of agency: rational agency,
in general, and moral agency, in particular.6
We begin with the theory of rational agency, which Kant sets forth in the Kritik der reinen
Venunft. The core concept of this theory is character (Charakter). Kant defines character as a
“law of causality” (KrV, A 539/B 567) and he argues that such a law or pattern must be ascribed
2
to all causal agents because it is only by appeal to a specific cause’s basic way of producing
effects, its law, that it is able to explain any of its purported results. With this premise in hand,
Kant then moves to the question of rational causality, the causality of reason, and claims that
here there are grounds to assign both an intelligible and empirical character to the agent.
If we eschew the notorious difficulties involved in this distinction, Kant’s basic line of
argument is that two conditions must be met in order to account for these sorts of effects. The
first is that such actions must be shown to be products of prior patterns of beliefs, desires, and
inclinations and this is the empirical character of rational agents. But this alone fails to capture
fully the sense in which such effects are produced here only insofar as the beliefs, desires, and
inclinations in question are chosen as ends to be pursued by the agent. Accordingly, to explain
such an effect, appeal must be made not only to the empirical pattern that is evident in the
agent’s behavior, but also to the activity of determining itself whereby a specific belief, desire, or
inclination is selected as worthy of being pursued. Since this activity of assessing the desirability
of one’s empirical determinations, the spontaneity of practical reason, is not itself empirically
observable, Kant concludes that we must assign to rational agents an intelligible as well as an
empirical character.7
If we now apply this account to the discussion of the obligatory end of self-perfection, it
becomes clear that eliciting and nurturing the natural capacities and predispositions that comprise
our rational character is what the duty of natural perfection prescribes for us to undertake with
respect to ourselves.8 It is nothing less than an obligation to cultivate the capacities by which we
assess and set the various ends that we elect to pursue.9 This is minimally what it means to
establish a stable pattern of willing within one’s self. Now, as we shall see, Kant believes that
more is actually required here than simply a stable pattern of willing in order to have a genuinely
rational character. One must develop this pattern so that it exhibits self-governance. But this is
the concern of the next section. We turn now to the structure of moral agency.
The central concept of Kant’s account of moral agency is disposition or moral-mindedness
(Gesinnung). Although he employs the term in various texts, Kant offers what amounts to a
definition only in the Religion where he writes that Gesinnung is the “first subjective ground
(Grund) of the adoption of maxims” (RGV, AA 06: 25). By this he means the moral posture that
agents assume and steadfastly bring to bear in making choices with respect to their conduct. As
such, Gesinnung can be seen as a deepening of the idea of Charakter since it builds upon the
3
simple sense of a pattern of willing, a “law of causality”, developing this into a specifically
moral comportment or bearing (Haltung).10
Moral mindedness is clearly the object to which the obligatory end of moral cultivation is
addressed and Kant contends that it must be developed in two fundamental ways: (1) subjective
“purity (Lauterkeit)”, which is having a posture of taking the moral law alone as the incentive for
fulfilling one’s obligations, and (2) objective “perfection (Vollkommenheit)”, which is the
completion of all one’s duties both to one’s self as well as those we bear towards others.11 And,
just as with the duty of natural perfection, Kant offers the outlines of a program for inculcating
this kind of disposition, a program of moral education—comprised of an ethical didactics and an
ethical ascetics12—that, as Kant puts it in the second Kritik, is nothing other than a method for
gaining access and having influence over the mind or heart (Gemüt) of moral agents whereby
“objectively practical reason” can be made “subjectively practical” (KpV, AA 05: 151).13
With this basic outline of Kant’s theory of practical agency now in place, we can return to
our original concern, the social and political conditions for the formation of virtuous character.
The key point to see here is that the account of practical agency implies that the development of
rational character is the precondition for the cultivation of moral disposition. That sis to say, the
forging and transforming of one’s fundamental moral orientation necessarily presupposes a
developed pattern of willing. To be morally minded requires an already established propensity,
an enduring character, that seeks after rationally chosen ends in general. We can use this insight
now to propose an interpretive hypothesis: the key to establishing the dependency of virtue upon
right lies in the relationship of rational character, and our duty to ourselves to perfect it, and
moral disposition, and our duty to ourselves to cultivate it, and, as we shall see, this relationship
is worked out, for Kant, in terms of the concept of culture.
Accordingly, this hypothesis raises three basic questions: (1) what are the specific institutions
and practices that comprise Kant’s theory of culture?, (2) how do they serve to facilitate the
development of rational character and, by this, set the stage for the cultivation of moral
disposition? and, finally, and most importantly, (3) what is Kant’s justification for the claim that
the proper task of culture is to prepare those under its care for forging genuinely virtuous
character? The answer to these questions all lie in the framework for the critical philosophy of
natural history that Kant lays down in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. We will thus examine this last
question in the next section, and take up the first two questions in the concluding part.
4
II
As we noted above, to address the question of the justification of the task of culture we must turn
to the distinction Kant draws between the “ultimate end” and the “final end” of nature. The
proper interpretation of this distinction has, of course, been a matter of some controversy
especially since it serves as the crux of one of Kant’s principal arguments in the Kritik der
Urteilskraft. To understand it, then, I want briefly to reconstruct the context in which it is
invoked.
In the second part of the Kritik, the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment”, it is
well known that Kant argues that the scientific study of nature requires us to see the whole of
nature as a systematic whole. Under the regulative principle of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit),
this view is authorized as a requirement rooted primarily in the discursive nature of human
cognition. What is less well known is that Kant contends that this same argument also entails that
we must take nature not only as a system, but as a teleological process as well. That is, nature
must be seen as having a history and thus as possessing a unique purpose towards which it
continually strives, the “ultimate end of nature as a teleological system” (KU, AA 05: 429).14
Kant claims that this end is the development of the human capacity to set and pursue purposes.
But this capacity merits this standing, Kant argues, only insofar as human beings possess the
ability to set for themselves the truly unconditional, obligatory end of morality, the “highest
good”, what Kant here calls the “final end of the existence of a world, i.e., of creation itself”
(KU, AA 05: 434). The move from the ultimate to the final end is thus, at the level of the human
species, the move from one of the kinds of moral duty that we bear towards ourselves to the
other, from natural to moral perfection, from the cultivation of rational character to that of moral
disposition.15 But, as this outline already indicates, the argument in the third Kritik establishes a
clear hierarchy: satisfying the ultimate end of nature, natural perfection, is a conceptual
precondition for satisfying the final end of nature, moral cultivation. To see why this is, we need
to lay out the core argument at issue here as clearly as possible.
We begin with the distinction itself. An ultimate end is the end or purpose with reference to
which it is possible to think of a teleological system—in this case, nature—as a unified whole.
The ultimate end serves as the governing idea under which the various parts of the system—here,
the empirical laws of nature—are gathered together and unified. An ultimate end is thus ultimate
5
with respect to, and is thus conditioned by, other ends, in the present case, the natural ends
(organisms) that comprise the natural world. A final end, on the other hand, is a purpose pursued
solely for its own sake and cannot serve as a means to any other end. Consequently, a final end is
unconditional and thus relates to other ends, such as organisms, only negatively. Kant’s thesis is
that humanity is both the ultimate and the final end of nature, but it is so in importantly different
respects.
Kant’s argument begins by contending that human beings as rational agents are the only
beings qualified to hold the status of the ultimate end of nature because they are the only natural
organisms that are capable of setting ends and organizing them into a system.16
He then asks what it is precisely about humanity as rational agents that can serve as the
fundamental end under which all the other ends of nature can be organized. He consider two
candidates: happiness (Glückseligkeit) and culture (Kultur) (KU, AA 05: 430). Happiness, which
Kant defines, as he regularly does, as the complete satisfaction of the sum of all our desires,17
cannot be the ultimate end, he argues here initially, since this is clearly not a purpose set by
nature at all as the insatiability of human beings and the destructive effects of the mechanism of
nature both attest.
Having eliminated this option, Kant concludes that the only end within humanity that merits
being considered to be the ultimate end of nature must be “what nature is capable of doing in
order to prepare (vorzubereiten) him [man] for what he must himself do in order to be a final end
(Endzweck)” (KU, AA 05: 431).
Note again, though, Kant’s line of reasoning: being the ultimate end of nature is contingent
on satisfying a further condition. Humanity does not merit the rank of the highest natural being,
Kant holds, unless this position prepares us to be something more than simply natural, in
particular, unless this position serves to prepare us not just to be rational agents, but moral agents
as well.
But why must the ultimate end be that which prepares us to be a final end? This crucial
question takes us to the very core of Kant’s argument:
As the sole being on earth who has understanding, and thus a capacity to posit voluntary ends
for himself, he [man] is certainly the titular lord of nature, and, if nature is regarded as a
teleological system, then it is his vocation (Bestimmung) to be the ultimate end of nature
(der letzte Zweck der Natur); but always only conditionally (bedingt), that is, subject to the
condition that he understands and has the will to give to nature and to himself such a relation
6
to an end (Zweckbeziehung) that can be sufficient for itself independently of nature, which
can thus be a final end (Endzweck), which, however, must not be sought in nature at all (KU,
AA 05: 431).
The train of thought here is extremely compressed, but I propose that it can be unpacked in the
following way. Kant argues that possessing the capacity to set ends and organize them is not, in
and of itself, sufficient for humanity to merit the standing of the ultimate end of nature for being
the ultimate end depends not just on the ability humanity has to value things, that is, to set ends,
but on the object of their valuing as well. It is not just their capacity to set and pursue some
purpose that makes humanity deserving of this rank, but the aim that they pursue. The reason for
this is that if the purposes humans set for themselves were simply and wholly the satisfaction of
their desires and inclinations, that is, if their fundamental and highest good was nothing other
than their happiness (Glückseligkeit), then their capacity to be genuinely self-governing would be
placed in service to the bestial ends that they possess along with all other mammals. They would
thus give themselves over to a condition of heteronomy. Kant’s invocation of happiness here
clearly introduces another, deeper criterion than the simple counterfactuals to which he appealed
earlier to eliminate this as a viable option for the ultimate end. Happiness is now seen as
compromising autonomy. The operative premise underlying his account of culture must be that
the cultivation of the capacity or aptitude for setting rational ends here is done in a fashion that
seeks to elicit and nourish self-governance.
Now this is precisely what culture does according to Kant. It prepares humanity to undertake
those projects whereby it will make itself into a final end. Culture does this, Kant maintains,
through its institutions and practices producing, what he calls, the “aptitude (Tauglichkeit) of a
rational being for any ends in general (thus those of his freedom)” (KU, AA 05: 431). Kant’s
conclusion, then, is that culture is the ultimate end of natural history because it facilitates the
development of what we saw him refer to in the first Kritik as rational character. Culture enables
us to build up a stable pattern of willing.
Kant’s argument then is that if what makes the human species deserving of the status of the
ultimate end is their capacity to set ends for themselves in a way that perpetuates their
rationality, and if rationality is minimally conceived as their capacity for self-governance, for
autonomy, then it follows that humanity is the ultimate end only insofar as it understands and
desires to posit purposes that are not simply part and parcel of the natural world, but rather, ones
7
that legislate and embrace self-governance itself. But what could such ends as these be? Or, to
put the question, more generally, what end is entitled to be the final end of nature?
A final end is that end that presupposes no other end beyond itself for which it might serve as
a means. It is an end pursued solely and wholly for its own sake. In a word, it is unconditioned.
But as an end, a final end must also be teleological; that is, to be the final end of nature, it must
itself be a natural organism and thus be explicable ultimately only in teleological terms. It
follows, Kant argues, that the final end must be, at once, the supreme purpose of all other
purposes and an organized being. The final end, then, must be, the highest natural being, what
has proved to be the ultimate end of nature, and yet itself still be a rational agent, a being that
acts by virtue of setting and pursuing its own ends.
Kant reminds us that there is nothing simply and wholly in nature that can meet these
requirements; nothing in nature is unconditioned, though only natural organisms work by virtue
of teleological causality. The question of the final end, then, is the question of what natural
organism, at the same time, is able, in its causality, to posit and pursue genuinely unconditional
(non-natural) ends:
The being of this sort is the human being, though considered as noumenon: the only natural
being in which we can nevertheless cognize, on the basis of its own constitution, a
supersensible faculty (freedom) and even the law of the causality together with the object that
it can set for itself as the highest end (the highest good in the world) (KU, AA 05: 435).
Kant’s argument, then, is that the standing of the human species as the highest form of natural
organisms is dependent upon the fact that their being this sets the stage for the cultivation of their
innate capacity to posit for themselves truly unconditional ends, which, he contends, can only be
the obligatory ends of morality. Accordingly, he concludes, the human species is entitled to be
thought as the ultimate end towards which natural history progresses only insofar as it takes up
the task of preparing rational agents to set for themselves and for nature as a whole an end that is
“sufficient for itself independently of nature”, the “highest good”.
Now if this reading is correct, it has immediate and important consequences for the
relationship between virtue and right. For if the ultimate end of nature is culture, and culture is
nothing other than the development of our natural capacities and predispositions to set ends in a
self-governing fashion, and, furthermore, if this is entitled to be the ultimate end only insofar as
it sets the stage for the cultivation of moral agents, the final end of creation, then establishing an
8
environment that enables moral virtue to be cultivated, that is, a space within which humans are
enabled to develop a stable pattern of willing, a rational character, upon which programs of
moral education, which would seek to develop moral mindedness, can then be built and flourish
is the precondition for humanity to be taken as the ultimate end of nature. Culture, then, is, for
Kant, the ultimate end of nature precisely because it develops the human capacity for selfgovernance and this, in turn, prepares human beings to cultivate, for themselves, a way of being
that pursues the moral law for its own sake (holiness) and strives to fulfill all the obligations that
this principle lays down (perfection). Culture, therefore, is not only the ultimate end of natural
history, it is the condition of the possibility for the formation of genuine moral virtue and striving
after the regulative idea of ethical community.
III
I want to conclude now by briefly returning to our other questions about culture, namely what
are its specific institutions and practices and how do they serve to facilitate the development of
rational character and, by this, set the stage for the cultivation of moral disposition?
As the ultimate end of nature, culture, for Kant, denotes a process, which, since its principal
task is the development of the human capacity for self-governance, that is, rational character,
necessarily takes forms that correspond to the basic structure of willing as such: the activity of
striving after an end. Kant therefore delineates a twofold scheme: a “culture of skillfulness
(Geschicklichkeit)”, which is devoted to perfecting the aptitude for pursuing and advancing ends
in general, and a “culture of discipline (Zucht)”, which seeks to raise the will above the simple
ends to which it can become enslaved through its sensibility.18
The culture of skillfulness, on Kant’s account, encompasses the various technologies and
forms of non-specialized labor that are necessary for the creation and maintenance of social order
and, in particular, for the satisfaction of needs and the pursuit of prosperity. This sector operates
by social differentiation and stratification, but at its core is the mundane routine of doing what
must be done for others in order to sustain one’s self. However, Kant recognizes that producing
social order in this way inevitably leads to deep and abiding conflict that necessarily threatens
the very existence of society itself. The culture of skillfulness thus inherently produces a
“shining squalor (gläzende Elend)” (KU, AA 05: 432), as Kant calls it, and precisely this same
sort of conflict, in the form of war, arises between states competing with one another for scarce
resources. As a result, Kant argues that the culture of skillfulness must include not just stratified
9
labor practices, but also a set of concrete political institutions whose charge is to constrain the
potential to abuse the freedom both of individuals and that of states by setting in place laws that
demand and enforce mutual recognition of equal liberty: a “civil society”, to rule the domestic
sphere, and a “cosmopolitan whole”, to reign internationally (KU, AA 05: 432).19 The culture of
skillfulness is thus an intricately woven tapestry of practices and institutions that mold and shape
the striving of those under their aegis through need, routine, and, where necessary, through the
rule of law and the attendant threat of punishment.
The culture of discipline, on the other hand, is concerned principally with the activity of
willing itself. The search for truth in the rational and natural sciences as well as the disinterested
creation and experiencing of works of art make human striving receptive to ends that are higher,
more nobler, than those arising simply out of nature itself. By raising the trajectory of willing
beyond the realm of physical needs and desires, the arts and sciences work to break down the
tyranny and despotism of our animality and liberate the will to seek after more universal, higher
ends. Kant accordingly concludes that these pursuits “make human beings, if not ethically better,
at least better mannered for society” (KU, AA 05: 433).20
In conclusion, then, we see that the forms of culture seek to foster an enduring pattern of
autonomous willing, and, in this way, lay the foundation for moral education. For Kant, then,
neither the development of genuinely rational character nor that of a moral disposition is
something that can be undertaken in solitude. It is a social and political endeavor. Living under
the aegis of such a culture, participating in its political institutions and social practices, is the
only way to facilitate the development of a genuinely stable pattern of self-governance and
thereby to begin to till the soil of our “crooked timber” so as to ready us for the future work of
harvesting virtue.
Virtue and right therefore meet on the terrain of culture. Their justificatory resources remain
distinct, but the regulative principle of natural teleology bridges this chasm and shows the
actualization of virtue to be dependent upon the founding and sustaining of a rightful condition.
Kant’s practical philosophy thus fails to be confined in the caricature deontological
individualism with which it has so often been identified. To be a rational agent is to be a member
of a juridical culture and it is this that enables us to take up the pursuit of virtue in collaboration
with others. And we would thus do well to reorient our future readings of Kant’s practical
philosophy around this neglected insight.
10
1
Cf. MS, AA 6: 218-221 & 379-382.
Apart from citations from the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, which are to the standard A and B pagination for the
first and second editions, all references to Kant’s writings cite the volume and page number of Kants gesammelte
Schriften. Ed. Deutschen (formerly, Königlich Preußischen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer,
subsequently, Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1900-) in accordance with the following scheme of abbreviation:
KrV
Kritik der reinen Venunft [1781/1787]
GMS
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [1785]
KpV
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft [1788]
KU
Kritik der Urteilskraft [1790]
RGV
Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft [1792-1793, 2nd ed. 1794]
MS
Die Metaphysik der Sitten [1797]
2
For this kind of reading, see Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Clarendon
Press 2005), 126-129.
3
Allen Wood has addressed this issue in a number of works—arguing that the pursuit of virtue is, for Kant,
necessarily social—but, in my judgment, he fails to develop the distinction and relationship between rational and
moral cultivation that we shall explore here and he also does not set out the systematic foundations, the account of
practical agency, upon which Kant sought to establish the unity or harmonization of virtue and right. For Wood’s
account, see his Kant’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 9 & Conclusion.
4
There has been a growing trend amongst some in the secondary literature seeking to move Kant away from the
deontological reading towards a more virtue based approach and the present essay shares this general stance.
However, what has largely gone missing in this reading has been a clear development of the conceptual foundations
for such an interpretation. The present essay seeks to redress this neglect.
For recent examples of the virtue reading, see Onora O’Neill, “Kant after Virtue,” in her Constructions of
Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 145-162;
Robert B. Louden, “Kant’s Virtue Ethics,” Philosophy, vol. 61, no. 238 (October 1986): 473-489; Nancy Sherman,
Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Scott
M. Roulier, Kantian Virtue at the Intersection of Politics and Nature: The Vale of Soul-Making (Rochester, NY: The
University of Rochester Press, 2004); Barbara Herman, Moral Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2007); and Chris W. Suprenant, “Cultivating Virtue: Moral Progress and the Kantian State,” Kantian Review, vol.
12, no. 1 (March 2007): 90-112.
5
MS, Tugendlehre, AA 06: 382-394. For an analysis of this concept, see Mary Gregor, Laws of Freedom: A Study of
Kant’s Method of Applying the Categorical Imperative in the Metaphysik der Sitten (New York: Barnes and Noble,
1963); and Henry E. Allison, “Kant’s Doctrine of Obligatory Ends,” in his Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s
Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 155-168; and for discussion
of the duty to perfect one’s self in particular, see Lara Denis, Moral Self-Regard: Duties to Oneself in Kant’s Ethics
(New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), esp. chaps. 1 & 4.
For detailed treatments of Kant’s theory of practical agency, to which the present discussion is indebted, see Henry
E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. Part I, Chapter 2 and
Part II, Chapter 7; and G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The “Critical” Link of
Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
6
7
To ascribe causal efficacy to a rational agent thus means that, from the point of view of empirical character, the
action in question is produced as the result of a interlinked chain of beliefs and desires that form the end being
11
pursued, while, from the point of view of intelligible character, the action is, at the same time, a product of the
deliberative spontaneity of practical reason that deemed this set of beliefs and/or desires as an end worthy of being
pursued.
These include, Kant tells us, our powers of “spirit, mind, and body” as these are the “means to all sorts of possible
ends” (MS, Tugendlehre, § 19, AA 06: 444).
8
9
We should acknowledge here that the identification of character as the object of the duty to perfect ourselves
appears to render the obligation all the more puzzling, if not simply incoherent. How is one to develop powers and
capabilities for one’s intelligible character? If it truly is not open to empirical observation, then how could one know
that whatever exercises one was engaging in to effect this cultivation were or were not having any effect? More
fundamentally, if to be intelligible means “not to be subject to the form of time” (KrV, A 551/ B 579), as Kant
holds, that is, if intelligible character is in some sense free from the condition of time, then how could any
transformation in its nature take place at all? Isn’t transformation an inherently temporal notion? Mustn’t we thus
conclude that the obligation to perfect this kind of character is fundamentally some kind of category mistake?
I propose a way through these questions, which plague the account of moral disposition as well, in note 13
below.
10
Kant’s conception of this kind of enduring way of being is distinctive in that, for him, Gesinnung is to be
understood as a first-order governing maxim, one’s general ethical orientation, on the basis of which second-order
maxims, that is, choices of specific action guiding principles, are adopted.
11
Cf. MS, Tugendlehre, § 21, AA 06: 446.
For examinations of Kant’s program of “moral education”, see Paul Moreau, L’éducation morale chez Kant
(Paris: Cerf, 1988) and Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 2
I shall not be discussing the central institution of moral education to which Kant devoted quite a bit of
attention, namely the church. Kant defines the church as an “ethical community” and distinguishes it from what he
calls the “juridical community” of the state (cf. RGV, Part Three). On Kant’s view, the church is the habitat that
nurtures ethical didactics and ascetics and, as such, it is required for the inculcation of moral-mindedness. But, on
the argument that I am seeking to develop here, it is itself dependent upon the protections and obligations laid down
and enforced in a condition of right. That is to say, a juridical community is necessary for the formation and
nurturing of an ethical community.
On the role of the church in the social endeavor of virtue for Kant, see Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 125-132;
and Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, 313-317.
12
13
The conceptual basis for such a regimen lies in Kant’s claim that virtue is not innate. Kant argues that, since we
are morally obligated to forge such a disposition, and given that ought implies can, virtue must be able to be
acquired (cf. MS, Tugendlehre, § 49, AA 06: 477; 380, 387, 390-395, & 405; GMS AA 4: 435; KpV, AA 05: 84,
118, 128, & 160; & RGV, AA 06: 37 & 57). But for virtue to be acquirable, an agent’s moral mindedness
(Gesinnung), their most fundamental moral way of being, must be open to transformation, that is to say, one’s basic
moral posture must be able to be profoundly changed from, for example, an orientation to do that which violates the
moral law, what Kant famously calls “radical evil”, to that which not only complies with the moral law, but takes the
moral law itself as its incentive. In the Religion, Kant famously draws precisely this conclusion. Referring once
again to the distinction between intelligible character, what he calls here, the “mode of thought (Denkungsart)”, and
empirical character, the “mode of sense (Sinnesart)”, he writes that for such a transformation in one’s Gesinnung “a
revolution is necessary in the mode of thought but a gradual reformation in the mode of sense” (RGV, AA 06: 47).
(On the issue of moral reformation and the problem of personal identity, see Jacqueline Mariña, “Transformation
and Personal Identity in Kant,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 2000): 479-497.)
But if this is correct, then the questions concerning the epistemic and temporal nature of such a disposition,
those which arose concerning intelligible character in note 8 above, necessarily return here. How can one know
whether or not a program of moral cultivation is being effective in bringing about a genuine “revolution” in one’s
intelligible Gesinnung? And how can one’s intelligible Gesinnung change if it is beyond the conditions of time?
12
Obviously, to develop the kind of detailed response that these complex issues merit is beyond the confines of
the present essay. However, we can say that the key move in replying to these puzzles is to note that, throughout his
mature writings, Kant repeatedly appeals to the idea that we impute causal efficacy to the intelligible character of an
agent solely on the basis of empirical events. This presumes, as Kant claims in the first Kritik, that the intelligible
character, precisely since it is not knowable, “would have to be thought in conformity with the empirical character”
(KrV, A 540/B 568). And, analogously, Kant contends, in the Religion, that the results of moral education are
empirically observable in the gradual “striving for the better” that constitutes genuine reformation and this leaves
room, as he puts it, “to hope that, by exertion of their own power, one will attain to the way that leads in that
direction, as indicated by a fundamentally improved disposition (Gesinnung)” (RGV, AA 06: 51). Consequently, for
Kant, a moral agent can never know, whether with certainty or not, that their moral mindedness is properly oriented,
that their effort fundamentally to transform their disposition has succeeded, but, because of the nature of imputation
itself, they are entitled to think that this is possible and to hope that a program of moral education will indeed gain
access and be able to transform their fundamental form of life.
I here leave aside a discussion of the relationship between Kant’s philosophy of history and the idea of rational
and moral cultivation. For an analysis of this issue, see Jean-Michel Mugliono, La philosophie de l’histoire de Kant.
Qu’est-ce que l’homme? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), chap. 3; Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant, History,
and the Idea of Moral Development,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 1 (January 1999): 59-80; and
Sharon Anderson-Gold, Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant
(Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 2001).
14
Pace Paul Guyer’s claim, in his “From Nature to Morality: Kant’s New Argument in the ‘Critique of Teleological
Judgment,” that “the ultimate end and the final end must be the same, namely the realization of the highest good”
(Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005], 331).
For excellent discussions of the distinction, see Klaus Düsing, Die Teleologie in Kants Weltbegriff (Bonn:
Bouvier Verlag, 1968); Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 175-177; and Pauline Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft. Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants
(Würzburg: Kötugshausen und Neumann, 1995).
15
Kant writes, “he [the human being] is the ultimate end of the creation here on earth, because he is the only being
on earth who forms a concept of ends for himself and who by means of his reason can make a system of ends out of
an aggregate of purposively formed things” (KU, AA 05: 426-427).
16
17
Cf. KrV, A 806/ B 834, GMS, AA 04: 394, 399, & 405, and KpV, AA 05: 22.
For a comprehensive treatment of Kant’s account of culture, see Monique Castillo, Kant et l’avenir de la culture
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990).
Kant’s theory of culture as the ultimate end of nature should be compared with his earlier usage of the term in
the first Kritik where he speaks of the “culture of human reason” (A 850/B 878). On this point, see Richard L.
Velkley, Freedom and the End of reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1989), chap. 5; and Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit,
Generation, and Community (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 178-182.
18
In the essay, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürglicher Absicht” [1784], Kant refers to what he
there called “a universal cosmopolitan condition”—a condition he defined in this period as comprised of two
domains: the right of a state, which lays down the fundamental norms of rational political authority, and
international right, which sets out the basic principles that are to govern relations between states—as the “womb
(Schoß) in which all the original predispositions of the human species are developed” (AA 08: 28).
19
The German reads: “für Gesellschaft, wenngleich den Menschen nicht sittlich besser, doch gesittet machen” (KU,
AA 05: 433 [emphases added]).
20
13