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Respect and Loving Attention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Carla Bagnoli
Carla Bagnoli*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI53201, USA
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Extract

On Kant's view, the feeling of respect is the mark of moral agency, and is peculiar to us, animals endowed with reason. Unlike any other feeling, respect originates in the contemplation of the moral law, that is, the idea of lawful activity. This idea works as a constraint on our deliberation by discounting the pretenses of our natural desires and demoting our selfish maxims. We experience its workings in the guise of respect. Respect shows that from the agent's subjective perspective, morality is the experience of being bound and necessitated, but also of being free and emancipated from inclinations.

Respect is a feeling that is generated by the agent's reflection on the nature of her own agency. It is not directed to anybody in particular, but to the very idea of rational agency, which is characterized by self-mastery and self-legislation. Contrary to animals, we do not derive our ends from nature, but we are capable of setting ends of our own, by exercising practical reason, that is, by engaging in the activity of law making.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 483 - 515
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2003

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References

1 Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Conference of the U.K Kantian Society at the University of Reading in 1999, at the Department of Philosophy at UW-Milwaukee in 1999, at the meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2000, at the University of Pavia and at the University of Rome in 2001.1 should like to thank Clotilde Calabi, Stephen Darwall, Luca Ferrero, Luca Fonnesu, Mark LeBar, Tito Magri, Elijah Millgram, Richard Moran, Christine Korsgaard, Onora O'Neill, Peter Rallton, Amélie Rorty, Marco Santambrogio, Julius Sensat, Sally Sedgwick, Gabriele Usberti, Salvatore Veca, Eric Wiland, my A.P.A. commentator, Daniel Weinstock, and in particular, two anonymous referees whose comments enabled me to improve this paper.

2 Kant uses ‘respect’ to name a moral feeling, a category of duty, a tribute, a maxim, and a sensitive basic concept. I will be concerned with respect as a moral feeling, which marks moral agency, arises from the contemplation of the law, and is directed to the value-category of dignity. The value-category of dignity refers to all rational beings capable of setting ends for themselves. Thus, for Kant respect also expresses mutual recognition, that is, the acknowledgement of humanity in ourselves as well as in all other rational beings. In this sense, respect qualifies as the evaluative attitude that is appropriate toward others. There are some important issues as to how the moral feeling of respect generates duties of respect, and relates to love and duties of love. I shall set aside the discussion of respect as a category of duty; my response to Murdoch is elaborated independently of these issues.

3 In many respects, contemporary philosophers move objections to Kant's moral psychology which are similar to the ones formulated by his first critics, Schiller and Hegel; see Schiller, F. Uber Anmut und Wurde, Schillers Werke (Stuttgart: 1867) 238-96Google Scholar, esp. 270-5; Hegel, F. Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1942), 90Google Scholar; F., Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979), 260-2, 386Google Scholar. The literature on the subject is extensive, but see e.g. H., Allison Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), 180-98Google Scholar; Ameriks, K. ‘The Hegelian Critique of Kantian Morality,’ in New Essays on Kant, Ouden, B. den and Moen, M. eds. (New York: Peter Lang 1987) 155-78Google Scholar; Henrich, D. ‘Der Begriff der sittlichen Einsight und Kants Lehre vom Faktum der Vernunft,’ in Kant: Zur Deutung seiner Theorie von Erkennen und Handeln, Prauss, G. ed. (Koln: Kiepernheuer & Witsch 1973) 77-115Google Scholar; McBeath, A. ‘Kant on Moral Feeling,’ Kant Studien 64 (1973) 283-314Google Scholar; Korsgaard, C. Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 77-105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sedgwick, S. ‘On the Relation of Pure Reason to Content: A Reply to Hegel's Critique of Formalism in Kant's Ethics,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 49 (1988) 59-80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, A. Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999), 40-49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, e.g., Blum, L. ‘Moral Perception and Particularity,’ Ethics 101 (1991) 701-25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buss, S. ‘Respect for Persons,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (1999) 517-50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Code, L. ‘Persons and Others,’ in Power, Gender, and Values, Genova, J. ed. (Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing 1987) 143-61Google Scholar; Cranor, C. ‘On Respecting Human Beings as Persons,’ Journal of Value Inquiry 17 (1983) 103-17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dillon, R. ‘Respect and Care: Toward Moral Integration,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1999) 105-32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maclntyre, 1982; Newman, M. ‘Did Kant Respect Persons?’ Res Publica 6 (2000) 285-99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noggle, R. ‘Kant, Respect, and Particular Persons,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (1999) 449-78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 452-6; Spelman, E. ‘On Treating Persons as Persons,’ Ethics 88 (1977) 150-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, B. ‘Persons, Character, and Morality,’ reprinted in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981) 1-19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Philosophers more sympathetic to Kantian ethics also show to be sensitive to the kinds of concern raised by Murdoch, and attempt to revise Kant's conception of respect accordingly, see e.g. Herman, B. The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993)Google Scholar; Hill, T. Respect, Pluralism, and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sherman, N. ‘Concrete Kantian Respect,’ Social Philosophy and Policy 51 (1998) 119-48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raz, J. Value, Respect, and Attachment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000)Google Scholar.

5 This is established by the argument from spontaneity, according to which ‘a free will and a will under moral laws are identical’ (Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in J. Ellington, 447). For an illuminating account of this argument, see Korsgaard, 159-187. All references to Kant's work are given in Prussian Academy pages.

6 It is important to stress that morality is experienced in this mariner, as a constraint and a kind of necessitation, which requires us a sustained effort. ‘All duties contain the concept of constraint by law’ (Kant, Virtue, 394). Herman, Compare B. ‘On the Value of Acting for the Motive of Duty,’ Philosophical Review 90 (1981) 359-82, 176ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sullivan, R. Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the Metaphysics of Morals, ‘duty of constraint’ (Zwangsplifcht) to ‘duty’ (Plifcht) in the second edition, Kant, Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, 381.

7 ‘This dislodgement of an obstacle is, in the judgment of reason, equally esteemed as a positive assistance to its causality’ (Kant, Practical Reason, 75). ‘For any diminution of obstacles to an activity furthers the activity itself (ibid., 79)’.

8 This is because all the inclinations and natural impulses are grounded on feelings. The effect on a sentiment is still a feeling: so the effect of the representation of the moral law is a feeling, see Kant, Practical Reason, 81.

9 ‘If anything checks our self-conceit in our judgment, it humiliates,’ Kant, Practical Reason, 75. ‘First, the moral law determines the will objectively and immediately in the judgment of reason; but freedom, the causality of which is determined only through the law, consists just in this: that it restricts all the inclinations, and consequently the esteem of the person himself, to the condition of compliance with pure law. This restriction now has an effect on feeling and produces the feeling of displeasure which can be cognized a priori from the moral law’ (Kant, ibid., 78).

10 ‘But the same law is yet objectively — that is, in the representation of pure reason — an immediately ground of the will, so that this humiliation takes place only relatively to the purity of the law; accordingly, the lowering of pretensions to moral self-esteem — that is, humiliation on the sensible side — is an elevation of the moral — that is, practical — esteem for the law itself on the intellectual side; in a word, it is respect for the law, and so also a feeling that is positive in its intellectual cause’ (Kant, ibid., 78-9).

11 On the reading I am offering here, drawing from Paul Guyer, the link between reverence of the law and respect for persons is provided by the principle of autonomy, that is, ‘the idea of the will of every rational being as universal legislating will,’ Kant, Groundwork, 431; this idea yields the imperative ‘do everything from the maxims of one's will as one that can at the same time regard itself as universally legislating,’ Kant, Groundwork, 432. See Guyer, ‘The Possibility of Categorical Imperative,’ in Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays, Guyer, P. ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield 1998) 215-18 and 234-9Google Scholar. I would like to thank an anonymous referee of this journal for pressing me on this point. I come back to this issue in section V.

12 To this extent, Raz's interpretation is misleading, and his objection misplaced: ‘It is true that Kant is happy to extend it to objects other than the moral law itself, but when used in this way respect derives from respect from the moral law’ (Raz, 134). The same mistake is to be found in Noggle, 455.

13 This objection is extended to various forms of contemporary ethics, which Murdoch claims to be Kantian in spirit, see Moran, R. ‘Vision, Choice, and Existentialism,’ Notizie di Politeia 66 (2002) 88-101Google Scholar.

14 Kant argues that although we cannot show how pure reason can be sufficient to determine the will, we can nevertheless consider what effect reason has on our sensibility insofar as it is regarded as an incentive: ‘For how a law in itself can be the direct determining ground of the will (which is the essence of morality) is an insoluble problem for human reason. It is identical with the problem of how a free will is possible. Therefore, we shall not have to show a priori why the moral law supplies and incentive, but rather what it effects (or, better, must effect in the mind), so far as it is an incentive’ (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 75).

15 This (partly) explains the apparent inaccuracy of remarks such as: ‘[Kant] did not officially recognize the emotions as part of the structure of morality…. However, in a footnote in the Grundlegung, he allows a subordinate place to a particular emotion, that of Achtung, or respect for the moral law’ (Murdoch, 366).

16 Kant, ibid., 27-9,46ff. To this extent, respect is the subjective part of the fact of reason. The fact of reason has subjective and objective aspects; see Beck, L. A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1960), 166-75Google Scholar; Beck, L. Studies in the Philosophy of Kant (Indianapolis: Hackett 1965), 200-14Google Scholar; Allison, 232. Objectively, it establishes the validity of the moral law and thus it proves the autonomy of the will, see Kant, Practical Reason, 55-7Google Scholar. Subjectively, it is the consciousness that the moral law is binding, and this is shown by respect. This subjective aspect indicates our consciousness of moral constraints on our deliberation and our capacity to act for the sake of morality. The analysis of respect presupposes the validity of the moral law, that is, the doctrine of the fact of reason in its objective aspect. However, respect is crucial in the presentation of the fact of reason from a subjective perspective: respect shows that we are capable of purely moral motivation and that the idea of the moral law is immediately binding. See Allison, 230-49; Korsgaard, 159-87; Rawls, J. Lectures in History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000), 253-71Google Scholar.

17 Henrich insists that this conception of respect poses a problem for Kant in that it is grounded on two different faculties (Henrich, 109,112-13); see also McBeath, 287.1 am proposing a more positive view, inspired by Allison's reconstruction, see Allison, part II; see also Muenzel, G.F. Kant's Conception of Moral Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997), 103;Google Scholar Rawls, 206-7, 322-5.

18 See Korsgaard, 159-88; Reath, A. ‘Kant's Theory of Moral Sensibility,’ Kant Studien 80 (1980) 284-302Google Scholar, at 295; Rawls, 291-308.

19 Frankfurt puts it differently: ‘The moral law can influence a person's conduct, Kant believes, only through the mediation of respect’ (Frankfurt, H. ‘Autonomy, Necessity, and Love,’ in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988) 129-41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 141. This suggests that whether the agent eventually acts for the sake of morality depends on whether respect is sufficiently strong to overcome the competing inclinations. For reasons I provide in this paragraph, Frankfurt's suggestion is misleading.

20 In the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, the distinction in the kind of legislation grounds two kinds of duties: duties of virtues and of right. While duties of right are externally sanctioned and enforced by an outer legislation, duties of virtue are self-imposed and enforced by an inner legislation; see Kant, Virtue, 389, 393, 397, 404, 408-9. The presence of respect shows that our action is principled and undertaken through an inner legislation. The account given in Metaphysical Principles of Virtue is more complicated than the one offered in the Groundwork, and I am not suggesting that the distinction between duties of right and of virtue map s onto the distinction between acting according to duty and acting for the sake of duty. Rather, I am simply pointing out that Kant is interested in drawing a distinction between external and internal correctness of actions, which is a distinction in the kind of legislation and motivation, see e.g. Baron, M. ‘Love and Respect in the Doctrine of Virtue,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 (1997) 29-44, at 37-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Not all alterations of mind qualify as a change in mind. To be a change in mind, an alteration must be neither imposed on the agent nor prompted by the circumstances, see Baier, A. ‘Mind and Change in Mind,’ in Postures of the Mind (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1985) 51-73Google Scholar.

22 As Wood eloquently puts it: ‘The innocent will can respect nothing, because it lacks the self-reflection presupposed by both self-esteem and self-conceit. It does not need to respect anything because its inclinations, which are in a natural (if fragile) harmony with the good, do not yet need to be checked by reason. The innocent will needs no law’ (Wood, Kant's Ethical Thought, 47).

23 There is scholarly disagreement as to whether dutiful actions always fulfill duties of respect. For example, Baron suggests that lack of respect as a moral feeling not only deprives actions of moral worth, but also makes them wrong; see Baron, and compare A. Wood, ‘Humanity as End in Itself,’ in P. Guyer, ed., 165-88. I do not address this issue here because it is not the kind of worry that Murdoch raises. My point is simply that the distinction between legality and morality is sufficient to respond to Murdoch's objection about the intelligibility of internal change in Kant's ethics.

24 In fact, they might not have an outward performance at all. They might not consist in any visible movement to track from the outside.

25 In the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue we read: ‘The faculty of desire is the faculty to be by means of one's representations the cause of the objects of these representations. The faculty of a being to act in accordance with its representations is called life’ (Kant, Virtue, 211).

26 The claim about the opacity of maxims is pervasive, see Kant, Groundwork, 407; Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Green, T. and Silber, J. trans. and eds. (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1960), 77Google Scholar; Kant, Virtue, 392; 447, Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Gregor, M. trans. (The Hague: Nijhoff 1974), 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Daniel Weinstock has pointed out to me that one solution is to claim that moral evaluation is essentially a retrospective practice: although we cannot know which maxims will really inform our future action, we can, nonetheless infer what our past maxims have been by a process of induction over classes of our previous actions (see e.g. Kant, Religion, 77). I take Kant's ethics to be practical and built into a first-person conception of oneself, and thus my strategy is to emphasize that the retrospective perspective of the evaluator is beside the point; on the merits of this strategy, see O'Neill, O. ‘Kant's Virtues,’ in How Should One Live? Crisp, R. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon 1996); Allison, 195Google Scholar. Respect is a check against self-deception in that being regarded as the ‘undoubted’ moral incentive, it reassures us of the moral content of our maxims.

27 In presenting this example, I follow Korsgaard's formulation of the maxim as exhibiting the structure ‘to-do-this-act-for-the-sake-of-this-end.’ One could also formulate the maxim in terms of reasons of justification; in this case, one would say that Margaret first justifies her action by endorsing the maxim ‘I will be nice to my daughter-in-law because I want to please my son’ or ‘because I want to abide by the rules of etiquette,’ and eventually she resolves to act because she respects Daisy.

28 Doubts about Kant's conception of character have been fostered also by the metaphysical interpretation of the distinction between intelligible and phenomenal character; see Mclntyre, A. ‘Why Moral Agents Became Ghosts,’ Synthese (1982) 295-312CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Williams. I put aside discussion of this issue, and endorse Allison's replies based on the practical interpretation of the distinction, see Allison.

29 On this interpretation, Kant's act of will is equated to Sartre's decision. Murdoch attacks Sartre insofar as he holds a Kantian conception of agency and freedom, see Murdoch, 133-6. For a forceful reply on Sartre's behalf, see Moran.

30 In this vein, Frankfurt remarks: ‘Now this pure will is a very peculiar and unlikely place in which to locate an indispensable condition of individual autonomy. After all, its purity consists precisely in the fact that it is wholly untouched by any of the contingent features that make people distinctive and that characterize their specific identities…. The pure will has no individuality whatsoever’ (Frankfurt, 132). Williams moves a similar objection to Kant: ‘My overriding aim is to emphasize the basic importance for our thought of the ordinary idea of a self or person which undergoes changes of character; when we reflect on these issues we discover that the Kantian view contains an important misrepresentation’ (Williams, 5). ‘Once one thinks what is involved in having a character, one can see that Kantians’ omission of character is a condition of their ultimate insistence on the demands of impartial morality, just as it is a reason for finding inadequate their account of the individual (Williams, 14). Williams’ objection moves from a conception of agency that represents a genuine alternative to Kant.

31 They are replaceable under specific capacities, e.g. person A can substitute person B in the specific capacity of teacher, but not in the generic capacity of agent. In terms of generic agency, it matters whether it is A or B to perform the activity of teaching. Although A and B are intersubstitutable as teachers, it matters whether either of them is eliminated, and therefore they are not mutually replaceable as agents.

32 Murdoch, 215. This presumption is widely shared among Kant's detractors: see Blackburn, S. Ruling Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 252-9Google Scholar; Dillon; Mclntyre; Williams, 5,14-15. See also Frankfurt, 132. For an illuminating account of the complications that arise about the relation between intelligible and phenomenal character, see Allison, 32-3. I believe that discussion of such complications can be put aside for the purpose of this paper.

33 Kant, Religion, 31-2Google Scholar. See Sullivan, chs. 9-10, esp. 126-7.

34 As Allison explains: ‘So interpreted, the conception of intelligible character really reduces to the thought of practical spontaneity, which functions regulatively in the conception of ourselves as rational agents with empirical character’ (138).

35 ‘The same subject is conscious also of his existence as a thing in itself determinable only by laws, which he gives to himself through reason. In this existence, nothing is antecedent to the determination of his will. Every action, and even the entire history of his existence as sensuous being is seen as the consequence of his causality as a noumenon. From this point of view, a rational being can rightly say of any unlawful action which he has done that is could have left it undone, even if as an appearance it was inescapably necessary. For this action and everything in the past which determined it belong to a single phenomenon of his character, which he himself creates’ (Kant, Practical Reason, 98-9Google Scholar).

36 For a thorough account of the implications of this thesis for moral education, see G.F. Muenzel.

37 A clear example of this phenomenon is Raz's recent proposal. He writes: ‘It appears that Kantian respect has little to do with contemporary thinking about respecting people. The moral law, rather than people, is the object of respect. And there are no duties or requirements to respect anyone or anything. Rather, (a feeling of) respect arises in us as the moral law determines our will. Contemporary discussions of respect for persons strive to articulate and defend a particular moral principle of doctrine, that is, one is saying in brief, that we must respect people. That principle has little to do with Kant's doctrine of respect, which, to repeat, does not add to the content of morality, but says that whenever we perform an action because we rationally believe that it is our moral duty to do so we act out of respect for the moral law. It is true that Kant is happy to extend to objects other than the moral law itself, but when used in this way respect derives from respect from the moral law’ (Raz, 134).

38 I leave aside the objection that reverence for the law describes or encourages the despicable attitude of following a rule. On this issue, see Arendt, H. Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin 1963), 134-8Google Scholar; Herman, ‘On the Value.’ The objection rests on a misconception of the object of the reverence for the law. Reverence for the law signifies reverence for self-governance and authority, that is, what is most remote from simply following a given rule whose normative source resides outside the agent, and which is the portrait of a heteronomous will. The way we express reverence is by representing and rationally endorsing the objective moral law as a principle of action, that is, by accepting rational constraints on our deliberation. See Kant, Groundwork, 429, 403. As Velleman explains in commenting this passage, the object of respect is the capacity for legislation (Geseztgebung) not a given law (Gesezt); see Velleman, D. ‘Love as a Moral Emotion,’ Ethics 109 (1999) 338-74, at 346CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But this objection also mistakes the object and the nature of the attitude that reverence for the law expresses. That is, reverence for the law must also be distinguished from the ground that motivates the agent to act according to a duty. Reverence for the law is the attitude that is distinctive and peculiar to the agent that performs his duty for its own sake, that is, the agents that understands and values autonomy and acts autonomously. Since in this sense autonomy is a qualification of the will, one cannot act out of reverence for the law when she merely follows a given rule.

39 Kant writes, ‘rational nature exists as an end in itself. We necessarily think of our own existence in this way; thus far it is a subjective principle of human actions’ (Kant, Groundwork, 429Google Scholar).

40 See Korsgaard, 110-14. As Korsgaard writes, ‘If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of the power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having, in virtue of that power, a value-conferring status’ (123). See also Guyer, 237 and Wood, ‘Humanity,’ 166-73.

41 Murdoch holds that ‘the shortcomings of Kant's aesthetics are the same as the shortcomings of his ethics. He is afraid of the particular, he is afraid of history’ (Murdoch, 214). In a similar vein, Dillon argues that to accept Kant's claim about the equivalence between reverence for the law and respect for people is to say that humans are in some important sense they are inter-substitutable, see Dillon, 121. For a reply, which I fully endorse, see Velleman, 367. This dispute echoes Hegel's critique of Kant's categorical imperative, but emphasizes the effect on the issue on mutual recognition. See Ameriks; Allison, 180-200.

42 This is established in Kant, Practical Reason, 79.

43 In fact, Murdoch is more aware of this similarity than contemporary readers are; compare Blum, L. ‘Iris Murdoch and the Domain of the Moral,’ Philosophical Studies 50 (1986) 343-67CrossRefGoogle Scholar and L. Blum, ‘Moral Perception.’

44 ‘The exercise of overcoming one's self, of the expulsion of fantasy and convention, which attends for example the reading of King Lear is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we do it properly which we hardly ever do, painful’ (Murdoch, 216).

45 See Louden, R. ‘Kant's Virtue Ethics,’ Philosophy 61 (1986) 473-89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Neill, O. ‘Kant After Virtue,’ Inquiry 26 (1983) 387-405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Neill, O. ‘Kant's Virtues’; A. Wood, ‘Final Form of Kant's Practical Philosophy,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 (1997) 1-21.Google Scholar

46 Freedom is itself a moral concept, not just the precondition of morality (Murdoch, 330). Murdoch conceives freedom as a moral achievement, that is, the achievement of a purified vision (Murdoch, 354). This is exactly what I take Kant to hold.

47 Differently from the Stoics, Kant believes that the source of evil resides in our ranking of maxims, not in the inclinations. They are neither good nor bad, although they represent a constant source of obstacles to morality. This is not to say, however, that inclinations or emotions are unconquerable forces.

48 As I explain in the next section, love and respect are deliberate in different senses.

49 Murdoch warns us: ‘We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central’ (Murdoch, 337).

50 For example, Anderson writes: ‘We can see that Kantian ethics is hampered by the fact that it recognizes only two ways of valuing things, use and respect. These two modes of evaluations are not enough to account for the richness of our experience of value and our practices’ (Anderson, Elizabeth Value in Ethics and Economies [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993], 9)Google Scholar.

51 It is fair to say that through his account of respect, Kant provides us with an aesthetic of pure practical reason, that is, a phenomenological investigation of the array of moral attitudes that constitute the experience of morality, ranging from humility to self-esteem, from frustration to self-contentment, from humiliation to elevation.

52 ‘If anything checks our self-conceit in our judgment, it humiliates’ (Kant, Practical Reason, 75; see also Kant, ibid., 78-9).

53 Velleman argues that love is very much like respect; his purpose is to re-establish love as a moral emotion. Frankfurt objects that Kant is wrong in considering love as adventitious, and protests that it is instead a configuration of the will, that is, neither affective nor conative, but volitional (see Frankfurt, 132,135). These philosophers address and criticize Kant's account of love as a pathological emotion, but their proposals do not constitute a genuine alternative to Kant's account of love as a moral emotion.

54 Practical love may require distance. You may realize that your friend needs to concentrate on her work tonight, that your presence is distracting, and so out of love you keep at a distance. But this is to say that distance is commanded by practical love, not that practical love is the perception of distance (as respect is).

55 Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Infeld, L. trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett 1980), 202-3Google Scholar. That on Kant's view friendship requires maximum reciprocity of love is rarely noticed; an exception is Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Locke Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002)Google Scholar.

56 I leave aside the analysis of these claims since I am concerned here with love and respect as moral attitudes, not as grounds for duties; see Wood, ‘Final Form.’ Dillon makes a similar move in her response to the objection that the concept of respect does not tell us precisely what we ought to do: ‘The concept of respect does not contain the resources for telling us how to treat persons; its function is rather to keep in the forefront of moral consciousness the attitude of valuing persons for their own sake and so to remind us why we should treat persons as morality obliges us to treat them’ (114 nl4).

57 In this passage, Kant appears to be using two different concepts of respect. See Baron, 34-5; Darwall, S. ‘Two Kinds of Respect,’ Ethics 88 (1977) 36-49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am solely interested in the standard sense, according to which respect is based on the dignity of the persons, and therefore everybody deserves it (independently of personal merit, role or office).

58 The term ‘accessory’ shows that Kant is not offering an account of over-determination. He is not arguing that a duty can be based on two sufficient grounds, but that there might be more than one ground for a duty, only one of which is sufficient, the other being an accessory.

59 Murdoch, 132; see also 68,102-103,267-268,311,339,345,368,385. It can be remarked that Murdoch attacks Kant mainly as the source of Liberal morality. Although her critique of Kant's conception of agency may be extended to Liberal models of morality, it would be a mistake to focus on her critique as directed simply to Liberal morality. In fact, she often insists that the influence of Kant's conception of agency is much more pervasive, see Murdoch, 68-70. ‘What haunts us is Kant’ (Murdoch, 132). On the implications of Murdoch's diagnosis of this loss of moral concepts, see Diamond, C. ‘Losing Your Concepts,’ Ethics 98 (1988) 255-77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.