8 - What is the enemy of virtue?

Summary

INTRODUCTION

What is the enemy of virtue? What is it that explains the empirically undeniable fact that, for human beings, becoming virtuous is a struggle, something accomplished in the face of some opposing force?

Answering this question is crucial for understanding what virtue itself is: if we do not understand what virtue has overcome, we don't really understand the state that results from the struggle. Yet Immanuel Kant is notoriously contradictory, or at best ambiguous, in his answer to this question. In the Doctrine of Virtue, the apparently unambiguous enemy of virtue is the inclinations, understood as a natural force. But in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant suggests that inclinations “bear no direct relation to evil” (RGV 6:35), and thus cannot be opposed to virtue. Instead, we must look to our free capacity to reason and choose as somehow being the internal, conflicted source of opposition. There is, thus, a major conflict in Kant's moral works. Having just (in 1793) identified our freely chosen propensity to evil as the enemy of virtue, he turns around four years later and claims that virtue involves the constraint not of freedom but of our unruly sensible natures. Which account should we prefer, and why?

In this chapter, I investigate this question. First, I compare the two scenarios: inclinations, then a particular state of a free, rational being, as the enemy of virtue.