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Kantian Ethical Duties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Faviola Rivera
Faviola Rivera
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico
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Extract

Perfect ethical duties have usually puzzled commentators on Kant's ethics because they do not fit neatly within his taxonomy of duties. Ethical duties require the adoption of maxims of ends: the happiness of others and one's own perfection are Kant's two main categories. These duties, he claims, are of wide obligation because they do not specify what in particular one ought to do, when, and how much. They leave ‘a latitude for free choice’ as he puts it. Perfect duties, however, such as the duties of respect, to avoid suicide, lying, and servility, do not appear to require the adoption of ends but only the performance or omission of specific types of actions. The puzzle is how these duties can be ethical, and therefore wide. Faced with this difficulty, Mary Gregor denies that perfect ethical duties are wide. She claims that they are an ‘anomaly’ and that they do not belong to ethics proper but to moral philosophy in general. She argues that these duties are derived from the categorical imperative, instead of, as Kant himself appears to have thought, the first principle of virtue. Taking a very different approach, Onora O'Neill finds the perfect/imperfect distinction of little importance and suggests doing without it altogether. Most other interpreters also assume that ‘wide’ is opposed to ‘perfect’ so that a wide perfect duty is a conceptual impossibility.

Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 11 , March 2006 , pp. 78 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 2006

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References

Notes

1 Gregor, Mary, Laws of Freedom (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), p. 126.Google Scholar

2 She claims that perfect ethical duties are derived ‘from the first principle of all duty prior to its differentiation into the special first principle of juridical duty and that of ethical duty’. They therefore belong ‘neither to jurisprudence nor to ethics, but to “moral philosophy in general”’. , Gregor, Laws of Freedom, p. 116.Google Scholar

3 Nell, Onora (O'Neill), Acting on Principle: An Essay on Kantian Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 48-9.Google Scholar

4 Gregor, Laws of Freedom, Hill, Thomas, ‘Kant on imperfect duty and supererogation’ in his Dignity and Practical Reason (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar . Marcia Baron and Nancy Sherman basically follow Hill's interpretation of perfect duties. , Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 27–36Google Scholar . , Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 332–50Google Scholar.

5 The view of Kant's ethics as act-centred is quite common. Roger Crisp, for instance, claims that ‘two of the most influential modern proponents of virtue ethics [Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair Maclntyre] advise us to jettison act-centred moralities of obligation such as Utilitarianism and Kantianism’. Crisp, (ed.), How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 5.Google Scholar

6 See Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue. I have argued for this view in Rivera, Faviola, ‘Moral principles and agreement’, Critica, vol. XXXII, no. 94, 2000.Google Scholar

7 Towards the end of the Metaphysical first Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue Kant remarks that ‘what is not done with pleasure but merely as compulsory service has no inner worth for one who attends to his duty in this way and such service is not loved by him’ (MPDV 6: 484/273).

8 , Hill, ‘Kant on imperfect duty’, p. 156.Google Scholar

9 Some interpreters have raised the issue whether the duties of Right belong to the moral domain. I believe that they do, though I cannot argue for it here. See Wood, Allen, ‘The final form of Kant's practical philosophy’, in Potter, Nelson et al. (eds), Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: The Southern Journal of Philosophy XXXVI, Supplement (1997), pp.1–20Google Scholar ; Paul Guyer, ‘Comments: Right and morality’, in , Potter et al. , Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 21–8Google Scholar ; and Thomas Pogge, ‘Is Kant's Rechtslehre Comprehensive?,’ in , Potter et al. , Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 161–88Google Scholar . Also see Hoffe, Otfried, ‘Recht und Moral: ein kantischer Problemaufrif?,’ in Neue Hefte für Philosophie 17 (1979), 1–36Google Scholar ; and ‘Kant's Principle of Right as a categorical imperative of law’, in Yovel, Yirmiyahu, (ed.), Kant's Practical Philosophy Reconsidered (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Kant, I., The Metaphysics of Morals, trans, by Gregor, Mary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6: 422/218Google Scholar . Following standard usage, I indicate the volume and page number of Kants gesammelte Schriften (published by the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin) followed by the page number of the English translation. The Metaphysics of Morals (hereafter referred to in the main text as MM) has two parts: Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right (referred to in the main text as MPDR) and Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue (referred to in the main text as MPDV)

11 On Kant's justification of coercion see Christine Korsgaard's ‘Taking the law into our own hands: Kant on the right to revolution’, in Reath, Andrews, Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 , Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans, by Green, Theodore M. and Hudson, Hoyt H. (New York: Harper and Row), 6: 33/43.Google Scholar

13 On this point see O'Neill, Onora, Towards Right and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 184–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; , Hill, ‘Kant on imperfect duty’, p. 148Google Scholar ; , Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, pp. 332 and 335Google Scholar ; Wood, Allen, Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 324–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Christine Korsgaard appeals to this same point to support the view that the strict/wide and the perfect/imperfect distinctions are not equivalent in ‘Morality as Freedom,’ in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 186, n. 25.Google Scholar

15 Kant, I., Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans, by Gregor, Mary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . In what follows I will refer to this work in the main text as ‘G’ followed by the volume and page number of Kants gesammelte Schriften and by the page number of the English translation.

16 ’Moral worth’ is a kind of value that the will and its actions have when it acts from duty. Kant's clearest example appears in the second section of the Groundwork when he claims that beneficent actions have moral worth only when done from duty. ‘Merit’, on the other hand, is a kind of value that actions have when, in addition to being morally worthy, are not owed to anyone in particular. Beneficent actions are also meritorious because helping others where we can is not strictly owed to anyone, according to Kant. Fulfilling a promise, by contrast, is not meritorious because it is owed to someone. See the discussion by Johnson, Robert N. in ‘Kant's conception of merit’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 (1996), 310–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar . He argues that some actions may be meritorious although not performed from duty.

17 Moral worth is a kind of value that our actions have whenever we act on a morally good maxim. Virtue, as I explained, is progress in the acquisition of an ethical maxim as a firm principle of one's own character. Similarly, deficiency in moral worth and lack of virtue are not the same thing either. We show deficiency in moral worth when we fail to act on a morally good maxim on any occasion but do not wrong anyone. Our conduct is lacking in virtue when our actions can be taken as failures to progress in the adoption of an ethical maxim over time, but do not wrong anyone either. Culpability and vice, by contrast, are the same thing.

18 The first emphasis is mine. A similar remark appears in 6: 393/197 where Kant claims that that the adoption of the end of the happiness of others is a wide duty because ‘[it] has in it a latitude for doing more or less, and no specific limits can be assigned to what should be done. The law holds only for maxims, not for specific actions’ (my emphasis).

19 The heading of section VI of the Introduction to The Doctrine of Virtue says: ‘Ethics does not give laws for Actions (Ius does that) but only for Maxims of actions.’ The heading of the following section (VII) says: ‘Ethical duties are of wide obligation, whereas duties of Right are of narrow [strict] obligation.’ Kant begins this latter section by pointing out that ‘This proposition follows from the preceding one’. I take this to mean that the proposition which is the heading of the VII section follows from the proposition which is the heading of the previous section (VI).

In addition to the title of section VII, the claim appears in 6: 392/195-6: ‘this duty is merely an ethical one, that is, a duty of wide obligation’; in 6: 393/197: ‘Hence this duty is only a wide one […] The law holds only for maxims, not for specific actions’; in 6: 395/198: ‘ethical obligation to ends […] is only wide obligation - because it involves a law only for the maxims of actions’; and in 6: 410: ‘this law i n ethics can be a law of duty given, not for actions, but only for the maxims of actions […] that, (as follows from this) ethical duty must be thought as wide, not as narrow duty’.

20 , O'Neill, Acting on Principle, p. 46.Google Scholar

21 I develop an answer to this question in Rivera, ‘Moral principles and agreement’.

22 Korsgaard, Christine, ‘Motivation, metaphysics and the value of the self: a reply to Ginsborg, Guyer and Schneewind’, Ethics 109 (1998), 49–66, p. 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

23 O'Neill, , Acting on Principle, p. 47.Google Scholar

24 Not all perfect duties require that we do not perform certain acts. Some perfect duties require the performance of specific acts, such as keeping one's promises. They are perfect because not keeping a promise amounts to treating the humanity of the promisee as a mere means for one's own personal purposes; therefore, the promiser owes the promisee the fulfillment of the promise. This kind of perfect duty is an acquired obligation because we come to have it through our own actions.

25 This is O'Neill's view in , O'Neill, Acting on Principle, p. 54.Google Scholar