This volume collects seventeen recent essays by Thomas Hill, Jr., exemplifying his brand of Kant-inspired moral philosophy. Part 1 (“Kant and Kantian perspectives”) explores Kant's moral philosophy in general.
Part 2 (“Practical Ethics”) focuses on applications of Hill's Kantian views to particular issues and to more recent work in ethics. Towards the end, Hill also articulates his “ideal of appreciation,” which he argues is an undertheorized but important aspect of our moral lives.
The prose in these essays is clear and accessible. Hill succeeds admirably in writing about core issues within Kantian ethics in a way that can function as an entry point for a generalist readership. His approach to moral theory is typically sensible, constructive, and takes non-Kantian perspectives seriously.
In ethics, one can still encounter a picture of Kant I call the “deontological caricature.” This Kant is a humorless, rigid purveyor of moral rules. He has little appreciation for human emotions and attachments, and no space for exceptions to his rules no matter the obvious moral cost. This is the Kant who wouldn't pull a lever to kill one even to save ten thousand, and who infamously responded to a suicidal young woman's pleas for help with stilted, uncompassionate sermonizing about duty (chronicled in Rae Langton, “Duty and Desolation,” Philosophy 67 (1992): 481–505).
Hill has long been an important voice among the Kantian ethicists who, over the last few decades, have worked to loosen the grip of the deontological caricature. His title clearly communicates his intent to present a different, more humane Kant. Hill's Kant can think “beyond duty” and wants to do justice to the complexity of human moral and emotional life. Where the resources in Kant's texts do not reach, Hill is also happy to step beyond Kant and, using the resources of contemporary ethics, to attempt to improve upon the Kantian view.
The essays are all reprinted from previous publications. I will not summarize each of the seventeen essays to an equal extent. I will try instead to identify major connecting themes and Hill's distinctive takes on them.
The first essay presents an overview of the Groundwork, which will be of use to orient novice readers. The second goes into ideas from Kant's later Doctrine of Virtue, specifically that of “imperfect duties to oneself.” Hill locates the source of our duties to develop our natural and moral capacities in the goal of living as a “rational autonomous person in a reciprocating world community of such persons” (p. 35). This goal combines the perfection of humanity in oneself with the ideal of a perfect human community. Whereas one might have thought that duties to the self are a private, self-enclosed affair, Hill shows that even here the social context of moral life is never far from Kant's mind.
The next four essays address two central features of our moral status: first autonomy, then dignity. Especially useful in both cases are the comparisons Hill offers with contemporary approaches, including existentialism, care ethics, the work of Rüdiger Bittner on autonomy, and the work of Michael Rosen on dignity. He takes Bittner to challenge the idea that we can meaningfully “bind” ourselves to moral norms, as he takes autonomy to require. Since nothing in the world enforces these norms and stops us from violating them, to call them “binding” rests on a confusion between ought and is. Hill's own take on autonomy emphasizes that it is a capacity to determine ourselves by standards we endorse (p. 47), and that our identification with these standards really binds us to them in a meaningful sense. He furthermore insists that this general self-legislation does not mean we tie ourselves to completely specific principles that leave no room for healthy judgment about particular cases (p. 67).
Hill takes from Rosen two challenges to a Kantian view of dignity. First, that it is based on a questionable metaphysics. Second, that it is indeterminate between multiple meanings and connotations (for example: an intrinsic value of every person vs. a “dignified” way of acting), leaving it unhelpful or even open to abuse. Hill argues that behind the different uses of dignity stands a unifying, albeit complex, idea. He views dignity as a kind of status that belongs to all rational beings and focuses on its practical implications in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals while de-emphasizing its reliance on metaphysics (p. 90). Dignity for Hill is not just a limit on how we can treat others, but also a positive ideal that ought to be promoted in others and in ourselves. This is also where we first encounter the “ideal of appreciation,” as Hill argues a full respect for dignity will open us up to “what is intrinsically worthy of attention in nature, art, and many aspects of ordinary life” (p. 102). More limited views of dignity – for instance, those that treat it only as a source of negative duties – will miss this important connection to appreciation.
Another prominent theme is whether thinking in terms of universalizable principles, as Kantian ethics demands, precludes ever making reasonable exceptions to general moral rules: that is, whether Kantian “utopian” thinking fails in non-ideal situations. Hill frequently makes clear that our general respect for human dignity is best expressed by standing up for it, even if that means lying to the axe murderer or torturing the terrorist to defuse a bomb. Exactly when to do this is a matter of judgment on which there remains room for reasonable disagreement.
Part 2 begins with an essay explicitly bringing together Hill's view of dignity with the above problem of tragic choices. It also showcases Hill's broadly constructivist understanding of Kantian ethics, indebted to Rawls for its emphasis on a deliberative framework that is meant to legislate a shared system of rules for a community or kingdom of ends (p. 159).
From this point forward, the general framework Hill has established is applied to particular issues such as philanthropic giving, suicide, and civil disobedience. These applications provide helpful engagement with other views as well as commentary on the framework itself. For instance, it is easy to see how Hill's way of thinking about dignity means that suicide – which the deontological caricature would condemn as always impermissible – can in some cases be the only, or best, way of preserving the dignity of a person. This second part also provides welcome and detailed engagement with the thought of other moral philosophers, such as Kimberley Brownlee and John Rawls.
The treatment of Brownlee's theory of conscientious conviction is interesting, since this is a topic that one rarely finds explicitly discussed within a Kantian framework. Brownlee argues from a pluralistic moral framework for the striking conclusion that we ought to apply to civil disobedience the protections now typically extended to conscientious objection. Hill does not directly pronounce on this conclusion, but instead takes Brownlee's analysis as a springboard to discuss the concepts of conscience and conviction. His discussion usefully canvases different historical conceptions of conscience including Kant's and Butler's, as well as a relativist conception he rejects. What is attractive about Kant's view, in Hill's telling, is that it puts practical reason first. Conscience is secondary in that it assesses the deliverances of practical reason and informs us when there is a disconnect between our basic moral judgments and our understanding of what we are doing. Thus, it is not itself a source of moral knowledge, but rather a canary in the moral coal mine that alerts us when we are failing to live up to our own standards.
Hill's main interest in Rawls is in the latter's views on the “sense of justice,” and on the relation between moral theory and empirical psychology. He considers the development of Rawls’ views in some detail and provides insightful comparisons with Kant's theory of virtue. On Hill's reading Rawls, more so than Kant, affords a proper place to sentiments in the development of virtue and sees correctly how the (in)justice of one's social situation can determine whether or not one has the opportunity to develop one's rational and moral capabilities. This allows him to explain why some people choose morality and others don't, whereas Kant has to insist that this choice cannot be explained because it is rooted in noumenal freedom.
The final two essays fully articulate Hill's “ideal of appreciation.” The main thought is that moral theory, especially its Kantian variety, tends to focus only on two kinds of attitudes: respect and care/beneficence. These relate to primarily negative and positive duties respectively. Hill believes we are ignoring a third attitude: appreciation, which consists in a recognition and appropriate response to its object as good for its own sake (p. 278). We can respect someone's rights and even be beneficent towards them without showing this kind of appreciation. In doing so, we treat them as more of an abstract object of moral attitudes than as a person with distinct good features worth attending to. It would be appropriate for such a person to wonder if they truly matter to us as who they are (pp. 288–89). A meaningful moral life includes an appreciation of people and things (art, natural scenery, human achievements, etc.). This appreciation goes beyond a recognition of perfection or objective quality; as Hill says, “we can appreciate a fifth-grade orchestra concert … without imagining that this is the Chicago Symphony playing or needing to compare the two” (p. 279).
Hill finally argues that this ideal can have useful applications in our thinking about disability. There are certain positive expressions of respect that go beyond merely respecting the rights of the disabled, and which are necessary especially in an ableist world where that respect is still often denied. Unless we are willing to appreciate disabled people and what matters to them as persons, we are unlikely to engage in such positive expressions of respect – or even to understand what they would look like. Merely focusing on the rights of the disabled, or on treating them ‘the same as anybody else’ does not yet entail treating them as complete and particular individuals in the way they – as, indeed, anybody else – are entitled to in virtue of their dignity.
The discussion of appreciation is interesting and an especially useful corrective to the deontological caricature. As a friendly suggestion, I would like to note that Kant himself may have already had a similar concept: Liebe des Wohlgefallens (“the love of satisfaction”). Pärttylli Rinne explicates it as “pleasure taken in the physical or moral perfection, or even the sheer existence, of the object” (Kant on Love (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), p. 6; Rinne prefers the translation “love of delight”). To love something in this way is distinct from being invested in its well-being (Liebe des Wohlwollens or “love of benevolence”) and seems to be an attitude of simply liking it for being the way it is. Rinne's discussion is one of very few, and the love of satisfaction rarely appears in Kant's texts outside of lecture notes. Nevertheless, I think Kantians would do well to consider it more carefully. I expect it does not do all the work Hill wants appreciation to do, but we will learn something from figuring out why.
