Ten myths of gifted education - Dr Louise Porter

Passion for Reason 1

Draft

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Passion for Reason:

Hume, Kant, and the Motivation for Morality

Paul Guyer

1. Introduction

Hume is famous for the assertion that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the

passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,”1 meaning that

our ends are set entirely by our feelings and that reason merely figures out the means to those

ends. As a member of the “moral sense” tradition established by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson,

Hume intends this to apply to moral as well as any other practical reasoning: morally permissible

or mandatory ends are likewise supposed to be determined solely by feeling, with reason again

confined to the role of figuring out the means to realize those ends. Thus, Hume says, “„tis

impossible, that the distinction betwixt moral good and evil, can be made by reason: since that

distinction has an influence upon our actions, of which reason alone is incapable. Reason and

judgment may, indeed, be the mediate cause of an action, by prompting, or by directing a

passion,” but they cannot “bestow those moral qualities on the actions, which are their”

immediate or primary “causes.”2 Meanwhile, Kant is equally famous for the assertions that the

ground of moral obligation “must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the

circumstances of the world in which he is placed, but a priori simply in concepts of pure

reason,”3 from which it is supposed to follow that “an action from duty is to put aside entirely

the influence of inclination and with it every object of the will; hence there is left for the will


nothing that could determine it except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this

practical law, and so the maxim of complying with such a law even if it infringes upon all my

inclinations.”4 The contrast could hardly be clearer: for Hume, passion alone determines even

our moral goals and the role of reason in the realization of these goals is strictly instrumental,

while for Kant reason alone determines the principle of morality and our inclinations or feelings

must play no role either in determining what is morally good or motivating us to try to realize

that. At least in its first appearance, the “obscure feeling” of respect for the moral law that Kant

recognizes is supposed to be “a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept and therefore

specifically different from all feelings” of any other kind,5 and moreover seems to be a

consequence and not a cause of the determination of our will by the moral law.

But is the contrast between Hume and Kant as simple as I have just made it seem? I will

argue that there is more common ground between the two philosophers than first appears, and

suggest that it is only on the ground that is common between them that we could erect a plausible

theory of our motivation to be moral. On the one hand, while Hume does stand by his theory

that our ends are always determined by our passions, he also supposes that most of us are

ultimately motivated by a passion for calm or tranquility, or a passion for freedom, at least in the

negative sense of freedom from domination by importunate desires. Thus reason may be the

slave of the passions, but we also have a fundamental passion to be reasonable. On the other

hand, for Kant the ultimate aim of morality is also freedom, although his understanding of

freedom is fuller than Hume‟s. Further, Kant‟s theory of moral motivation, at least at the

empirical level, is that we cannot be moral without an original passion for freedom, although that

passion must be redirected by reason from our own freedom to the freedom of all without loosing

its force. Thus, both authors ground the content and the possibility of morality in our passion

for freedom, although for Hume that is equivalent to a passion for reasonableness while for Kant

our native passion for freedom must be tempered by reason, and once so tempered Kant himself

would no longer call it a passion.


2. Hume: Calm Passion and a Passion for Calm

I begin with Hume. My exposition of Hume‟s account of the foundation of morality will

proceed in three steps. First I will remind you of Hume‟s well-known argument for his thesis

that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. Next, I will remind you of his

equally well-known claim that what appears to be more than merely instrumental reason in moral

motivation is actually only calm rather than violent passion. But finally I will turn from Hume‟s

Treatise of Human Nature to his restatement of his moral theory in his Enquiry concerning the

Principles of Morals to provide the evidence that he ultimately grounds morality in our

underlying passion for calm or tranquility.

Hume‟s argument that “moral distinctions” are “not deriv‟d from reason”6 is that reason

just reports facts and neither has nor generates preferences of its own, thus is not motivating,

while moral principles must be motivating and therefore depend on preferences that do not arise

from reason. In summarizing the argument this way I am using the word “facts” broadly, but

that fits with Hume‟s own broad usage of the term “reason” in his statement of this argument.

For while in his argument in Book I of the Treatise and the first Enquiry that our causal beliefs

are not founded on reason Hume had restricted the faculty of reason to the analysis of “relations

of ideas” and inferred that all of our beliefs about existence or “matters of fact,”7 including our

beliefs about the existence of causal relations, must be grounded on something other than reason,

namely repeated experience, in his thesis about moral principles in Books II and III of the

Treatise what was previously contrasted with reason, namely experience, is now lumped together

with it. Thus Hume argues that neither “demonstration [n]or probability,” neither knowledge of

“the abstract relations of our ideas, or those relations of objects of which experience only gives

us information,”8 by themselves give us any reason to act. We may know that one sum is

greater than another, that some object exists, or that some causal relation between objects or

states of affairs holds, but none of that would give us any reason to act unless we also have a

preference for a larger or smaller amount of something, for the presence or absence of


something, or for some alteration that we could effect by exploiting the causal connections that

obtain in the world. Taking action depends on an “aversion or propensity towards [some]

object,” or on “the prospect of pain or pleasure” from it,” and such impulses arise “not from

reason” but are only “directed by it,” because “these emotions extend themselves to the causes

and effects” of objects “as they are pointed out to us by reason and experience,”9 where the latter

is actually part of the former. Specifically, reason can tell us whether the objects of our emotions

really exist and whether the means we have chosen for a “design‟d end” are causally sufficient to

bring it about,10

but such knowledge has an influence on our action only to the extent that we

have desires or aversions, emotions or passions, with regard to the current or possible states of

the objects that may affect us and that we can affect. The passions for ends, however, are not

themselves established by reason, and it is on that account that Hume says so dramatically that

“„Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my

finger,” or conversely “to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of [a]...person

otherwise unknown to me.”11

Hume then completes his argument in Book III of the Treatise by taking it for granted

that “morals” are supposed to “have an influence on the actions and affections,” from which it

follows that “they cannot be deriv‟d from reason...because reason alone, as we have already

prov‟d, can never have any such influence.”12

Just as any action must originate from some

emotion or passion arising independently of reason even if reason‟s knowledge of relations,

existence, and causal connections may direct that impulse most effectively toward its object, so

too moral actions, including moral appraisals, must originate in a “moral sense,” or in feelings of

“pleasure or pain, which arises from characters and actions, of that peculiar kind, which makes

us praise or condemn.” Such feelings of pleasure are not functionally different from those in “A

good composition of music and a bottle of good wine,” although they are phenomenologically

distinct from those and those are phenomenologically distinct from each other.13

Again, the

broadly speaking factual knowledge provided by reason may direct our impulses to action that

arise from our moral sentiments, but reason does not originate those impulses.


Now all this is well-known, and I have belabored it only to remind you that the

conception of reason on which Hume bases his argument about the non-rational foundation of

moral principles, although broader than his conception of reason in Book I of the Treatise, is still

quite specific. My next point is also well-known. Hume wants to explain why, in spite of the

argument he has just presented, the belief that morality is founded in reason is so persistent. His

answer is that we are taken in by the fact that reasoning and experiencing moral sentiments do

not feel very different. For reason generally “exerts itself without producing any sensible

emotion,” and the moral sentiments, including both specific ones such as “benevolence and

resentment, the love of life, and kindness to children” as well as “the general appetite to good,

and aversion to evil, consider‟d merely as such,” are also typically “calm, and cause no disorder

in the soul,” so the latter “are very readily taken for the determinations of reason, and are

suppos‟d to proceed from the same faculty...which judges of truth and falsehood.”14

That is,

reasoning is calm, moral sentiments are generally calm, and so we mistake the latter for the

former (although apparently not vice versa).

But the main point I want to make is that Hume is not offering simply an error theory.

For he does not rest with the claim that we merely confuse the calmness of moral sentiments

with the calmness of reason, but rather argues substantively that among our deepest preferences

is a preference for tranquility or calm. If passions were always violent, it would be odd to say

that we have a passion for calm, but since Hume has just maintained that we have calm as well as

violent passions, he can coherently claim that we have a calm passion for calm. Since calm or

tranquility can be understood as freedom from the demands of importunate desire, we can say

that according to Hume we have a calm passion for freedom, at least in the negative sense of

freedom from importunate desire. And because calm passion phenomenologically mimics

reason, it can even seem to us that we have reason to desire freedom.

Hume argues briefly in the Treatise that our moral sentiments, feelings of pleasure

“which arise from the contemplation and view of particular qualities or characters”15

are

triggered in the first instance by qualities “immediately agreeable to others” and those


“immediately agreeable to the person himself,”16

and then derivatively by qualities that either

allow people to “perform their part in society” or “render them serviceable to themselves,”17

that

is, qualities that are means to being agreeable either to others or to oneself. This is the basis for

a more extensive discussion in the second Enquiry of social qualities, or qualities useful to

others, “Qualities Useful to Ourselves,” “Qualities Immediately Agreeable to Ourselves,” and

“Qualities Agreeable to Others.”18

Qualities such as discretion, industry, frugality, and

strength of mind, although Hume classifies them as qualities useful to ourselves, obviously allow

us to be useful to others as well, while qualities such as honesty, fidelity, and truth(fulness)19

are

more overtly other-regarding, but collectively all these qualities allow us to be effective in our

attempts to be pleasing or agreeable either to ourselves or others; they are thus the sorts of

qualities that reason can recommend to us, but only as effective means to the goals of being

agreeable to ourselves and others, which are not set by reason. Qualities immediately agreeable

to others include such things as politeness, wit, modesty, and decency,20

which are simply things

that we enjoy in our intercourse with others. Qualities immediately agreeable to ourselves

include cheerfulness, dignity, and courage, although the first two of these are obviously

agreeable to others as well and the last might seem at least as useful as immediately agreeable to

others as well as ourselves.

But even though Hume makes no attempt to reduce all agreeable qualities or even all

qualities agreeable to oneself to a single one, tranquility seems to have a special place among all

these qualities, as not only the most agreeable to oneself but also the most important condition

for being in all other ways agreeable and useful to oneself and others. Hume writes:

Of the same class of virtues with courage is that undisturbed philosophical

TRANQUILLITY, superior to pain, sorrow, anxiety, and each assault of adverse

fortune. Conscious of his own virtue, say the philosophers, the sage elevates

himself above every accident of life; and securely placed in the temple of wisdom

looks down on inferior mortals, engaged in pursuit of honours, riches, reputation,

and every frivolous enjoyment....And the nearer we can approach in practice, to


this sublime tranquillity and indifference (for we must distinguish it from a stupid

insensibility) the more secure enjoyment shall we attain within ourselves, and the

more greatness of mind shall we discover to the world.21

Tranquility consists in freedom from or superiority to such general disturbances as pain, sorrow,

and anxiety, but also in freedom from such specific, object-directed passions as those for honors

and riches. Since the undue influence of passions of either the former or the latter sort could

interfere with our effective pursuit of other self- or other-regarding goals, tranquility is necessary

for the effective pursuit of such goals. But since Hume has classified it as a quality immediately

agreeable to oneself, tranquility must also be something that we immediately enjoy and are

motivated to achieve for its own sake, and indeed it seems to be something that the wise person

is motivated to place at the top of her list of goals as both in some sense the greatest of pleasures,

perhaps the most enduring of pleasures, as well as the most important condition for effectively

achieving other aims. Yet since Hume has argued that we can make nothing an end without

having a feeling, emotion, or passion for it, we must have a passion for tranquility. Of course,

that must be a calm passion, since a violent passion for tranquility would be incompatible with

tranquility. So even though Hume does not want to found all of morality on a single impulse, a

calm passion for tranquility seems to be primus inter pares among the sentiments on which

morality is founded. And since calm feels like reason to us, the calm passion for tranquility as

freedom from domination by all our other passions seems like a passion for reason as well as a

passion for freedom.

So much for Hume. We will now see that although Kant‟s conception of the relation

between passion and reason, especially when he is being his most abstract, seems like the

diametrical opposite of Hume‟s, in fact Kant also recognizes the necessary role of something like

a passion for freedom, at least when he describes the “empirical character” of moral motivation.

3. Kant: A Passion for Freedom


In the first section of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant notoriously

appears to argue that only actions performed in the absence of all inclination have moral worth.

But this is just a heuristic device to demonstrate that the fundamental principle of morality is not

immediately concerned with happiness, certainly not one‟s own happiness: if the fundamental

principle of morality can be acted upon in the absence of inclination, what it enjoins cannot be

the gratification of (one‟s own) inclination. In the third section of the Groundwork and in the

Critique of Practical Reason, and equally notoriously, Kant argues that the determination of the

will by pure reason at the noumenal level is the ground of moral action at the phenomenal level.

Kant‟s theory of the freedom of the noumenal will is certainly diametrically opposed to Hume‟s

rejection of freedom of the will at the phenomenal level of human experience, the only level of

reality Hume recognizes. Yet Kant‟s own theory of the empirical etiology of moral action in his

late Metaphysics of Morals and perhaps even in the second Critique is by no means that pure

reason or the pure will effects moral action in the absence of or in spite of all our inclinations,

but rather that it effects moral action precisely through the refinement of our original passion for

our own freedom. It is at this level and/or stage of his thought that the important similarity as

well as most interesting differences between Kant and Hume emerge. What we will see is that

in spite of Kant‟s famous claim that “rational being” must be treated as an end and never merely

a means, Kant actually shares Hume‟s view that reason is merely a means, namely a means to

freedom, something for which, like Hume‟s tranquility, we have a passion, although a passion

that must be expanded from our own freedom to the freedom of all and which, being so

expanded, can no longer be called a passion but needs another name.

As previously noted, in the Groundwork Kant asserts that the principle of moral

obligation must be sought “a priori simply in concepts of pure reason,”22

and claims that the

only feeling that could be involved in a morally worthy action is the “obscure feeling” of respect

which is “self-wrought by means of a rational concept.”23

He continues that “Duty is to be

practical unconditional necessity of action” determined by reason alone, “and it must therefore

hold for all rational beings...and only because of this be also a law for all human wills.”24


Having said this, could Kant allow that we experience such a thing as a passion for being

rational, let alone that such a passion is a necessary condition for our performing our duty and

being moral? It would hardly seem that he could, for he defines passion (Leidenschaft, passio)

as the opposite or the obstacle to reason. In his textbook on anthropology, published at the end

of his career in 1798, he says that passion is “Inclination that can be conquered only with

difficulty or not all by the subject‟s reason”;25

in student notes from a version of his

anthropology course given in the period of the Groundwork, he says even more clearly that “All

passion is grounded on inclination insofar as it does not merely motivate [treibt] but dominates

[herrscht]. It is a dominating inclination that puts reason out of action [außer Stand setzt].”26

If passion is incompatible with the operation of reason, it would hardly seem that there could be

such a thing as a passion for reason, let alone that our being moral could be grounded on our

having a passion for reason. Passion and reason thus seem diametrically opposed, and the idea

of a passion for reason seems incoherent. But when we see that reason itself is not the ultimate

end in Kant‟s moral philosophy, but only an indispensable means to what is the ultimate end, we

will see that there is an opening for something like passion in Kant‟s moral philosophy after all.

For it is freedom that is the ultimate end in Kant‟s moral philosophy, and the idea of something

like a morally indispensable passion for freedom is not entirely incoherent. Kant thus shares

with Hume the ideas that morality is founded upon a passion for freedom and that reason is not

an end in itself but rather a means to the gratification or at least the refinement of this passion.

In lectures on moral philosophy dating back to the middle of the 1770s, Kant clearly says

that the “necessary law of free choice” is nothing other than the “conformity of free choice with

itself and others.”27

In the introduction to Naturrecht Feyerabend, a course on “natural right”

also given at the time of the composition of the Groundwork, Kant adds that rational beings are

“ends in themselves not because they have reason, but because they have freedom. Reason is

merely a means.”28

Kant‟s idea is that the goal of morality is to act in accordance with the

“greatest use of freedom”29

or to achieve intra- and interpersonal consistency in the exercise of

freedom, and that rationality is valuable not for its own sake but because it, as our capacity for


acting in accordance with universal or universalizable principles, is what allows us to exercise

our freedom in a consistent way.

And while the idea of a passion for reason seems absurd, the idea of a passion for

freedom is not obviously absurd. Indeed, again in his anthropology lectures, Kant describes a

passion for freedom as in many ways the most fundamental of all human passions: the

inclination to freedom is “the inclination to determine oneself in accordance with one‟s own

inclination and to be independent from the inclination of others....the first thing that the human

beings demands,” he says in the 1784-85 lectures,30

or “the greatest formal inclination and held

to be the greatest good by everyone” he says four years later.31

To be sure, this inclination or

even passion for freedom is an inclination for one’s own freedom, and to serve in any way in the

realization of morality this passion for freedom has to be transformed into a desire for the

freedom of everyone. This is where reason can come in, although Kant does not quite put it like

this, for reason can teach us each that our own freedom is no different and therefore no more

important than the freedom of anyone and everyone else. This insight requires us to redirect our

original passion for freedom, transforming its object from one‟s own freedom now to one‟s own

and everyone‟s freedom always, and in so doing it should transform the original passion for

one‟s own freedom into something no longer a passion incompatible with reason but some other

kind of feeling that is compatible with reason. My suggestion is that Kant‟s mature model of

moral motivation, at least at the empirical level, is precisely that our original impetus toward

freedom must be retained while its application is expanded beyond our own, present case.

Kant‟s model of moral motivation thus shares fundamental features with Hume‟s although his

account refines the conception of both of the elements, feeling and freedom, that we found in

Hume.

Kant‟s idea that freedom is the end of morality and reason merely its means pervades the

entire development of his moral philosophy. In his first published remarks about morality, the

“prize essay” of 1764, Kant argues that the formal first principle of morality provided by reason

must be accompanied by a material first principle that actually expresses the value that is to be


achieved through the use of reason.32

It is not a stretch to suggest that the material first principle

states the end of morality while the formal principle concerns its means. In this essay, Kant then

suggests that Francis Hutcheson was on the right path in suggesting that it is feeling that

determines the good or the first material principle of morality, but of course for Hutcheson what

the moral sense approves is benevolent intentions.33

However, in notes written soon afterwards

in his own copy of his other work of 1764, the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and

Sublime, Kant reveals his emerging view that freedom is the good or the material first principle

of morality that must be paired with a formal first principle due to reason. Kant‟s emerging

view can be seen in a remark such as this:

Since the greatest inner perfection and the perfection that arises from that consists

in the subordination of all our capacities and receptivities to the free capacity for

choice, the feeling for the goodness of the free capacity for choice must

immediately be much different and also greater than all of the good consequences

that can thereby be effected.

Now this capacity for choice contains either the merely individual as well as

the universal will, or it considers the person at the same time in consensu with the

universal will.34

That is, freedom is the material good, but since the formal principle of morality is universality, it

is the freedom of all, not just oneself, that is the object of morality. The challenge of moral

motivation is then to get from the feeling for the goodness of one‟s own capacity for free choice

to a recognition of the universal goodness of free choice that nevertheless retains the force of the

original feeling for one‟s own freedom. More fully, we start from a psychological preference

for freedom from our own excessive desires, which seems very much like Hume‟s desire for

tranquility,35

as well as from a hatred of domination by other people: “Nothing can open a

grimmer prospect of misery and desperation to me than that...my condition should not lie in my

own will but in that of another.”36

But we have to transform these personal preferences into a

moral principle, through the insight that “All right action is a maximum of the free power of


choice when it is taken reciprocally,” as Kant says in another note from the same period,37

without losing the vigor of those original preferences.

This idea of universal freedom as the end of morality also dominates Kant‟s lectures on

ethics in the 1770s. Here Kant says, for example, that “Moral goodness is...the governance of

our choice by rules, whereby all acts of my choice concur with universal validity.”38

We might

expect him to say “universal validity of” something, but precisely because he does not, we have

no way to fill in the missing term except as the universal validity of free choice itself, in other

words, the fundamental requirement of morality is that all acts of my free choice concur with the

universal possibility of free choice. Later in the lectures, in his discussion of “Duties to

Oneself,” Kant states that “the inner worth of the world, the summum bonum, is freedom

according to a choice that is not necessitated to act. Freedom is thus the inner worth of the

world.”39

He does not provide an argument for this premise, but he does tell us what follows

from it, namely that “The conditions under which alone the greatest use of freedom is possible,

and under which it can be self-consistent,” constitute the “principium of all duties.”40

Since he

is discussing duties to oneself, he goes on to detail the ways in which we each need to preserve

rather than undermine our own continuing possibility of free choice, above all by developing

what he calls “self-mastery,” the ability to regulate the “rabble element” of desires and

inclinations that would otherwise dominate our behavior.41

He reasserts at only at the end of his

treatment of duties to others that freedom is “the inner principium of the world,”42

without

having made it clear in the interval how our particular duties to others are actually duties to allow

them the same degree of freedom we are naturally inclined to claim for ourselves. But this is

precisely what he does in such a mature publication as the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of

Morals.

Now this claim might seem surprising, because instead of starting from the premise that

freedom is the inner worth of the world, the Groundwork proposes to derive the content of the

fundamental principle of morality from the common concepts of good will and duty and from the

philosophical concept of the categorical imperative itself, that is, the concept of the moral law in


the form in which it presents itself to us imperfect beings. From these concepts Kant derives the

first main formulation of the categorical imperative as the requirement to “act only in accordance

with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”43

and the second, “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of

any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means,”44

and neither of these

formulations makes any explicit reference to freedom. However, the requirement to act only on

universalizable maxims can be understood as the requirement to act only on maxims that could

be freely adopted by everyone, not just yourself, while since Kant means by “humanity” the

“capacity to set oneself an end -- any end whatsoever,”45

the requirement to treat humanity as an

end and never merely a means in everyone, not just yourself, can be understood as the

requirement to allow everyone the same freedom to determine their own ends that you naturally

claim for yourself. Both of these formulations of the categorical imperative can thus be

understood as variations of the fundamental principle of morality to allow everyone the same

freedom of choice that you claim for yourself.

That the fundamental goal of morality is the universalization of the freedom to set -- and

effectively pursue -- ends that everyone naturally claims for him- or herself can also be seen

from Kant‟s examples of duties following these two main formulations of the categorical

imperative. Kant‟s avowed purpose in these illustrations is to confirm his interpretation of the

categorical imperative by showing that it gives rise to the commonly recognized division of

duties into perfect and imperfect duties to self and others.46

But in fact his examples also

suggest a lexically ordered series of duties to preserve the capacity to exercise free choice and to

promote the conditions for the effective use of free choice. Kant‟s first example, the prohibition

of suicide, is a duty to preserve the existence of a free being, in this case oneself, and thereby

preserve its capacity for free choice. His second example, the prohibition of false promises, is a

duty to preserve the same possibility of the exercise of free choice by another on a particular

occasion that you would claim for oneself by not denying to the other the information about your

own intentions that is necessary for him to set his own ends without constraint by you. Kant‟s


third example, the duty to cultivate one‟s own talents, is a duty to put yourself into a position for

the effective pursuit of your own freely chosen ends. And finally, the duty to assist others is a

duty to further their freely chosen ends, just because they are freely chosen ends, when doing so

is consistent with the other duties regarding freedom that have been enumerated. Collectively,

Kant‟s categories of duty comprise the over-arching duty to preserve freedom of choice and

promote the conditions for its effective use, the “greatest possible use of freedom.”47

Thus

Kant, like Hume, construes the goal of morality as freedom, although he conceives of this

freedom not just as negative freedom from importunate desires but as the positive freedom to set

ends, and not just as one‟s own freedom to set ends but as everyone‟s freedom to do so.

I now turn to the second part of my argument, namely that Kant supposes that to act

morally is actually to refine an initial passion for one‟s own freedom into a positive feeling for

the freedom of all. In the Groundwork, as we saw, Kant states that since “an action from duty is

to put aside entirely the influence of inclination...there is left nothing for the will that could

determine it except objectively the [moral] law and subjectively pure respect for this practical

law,” and he describes respect as a “feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept.”48

Here the feeling of respect seems to be epiphenomenal, merely our empirical consciousness of

being motivated solely by the moral law at the noumenal level where the choice of principles

really takes place. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant begins to complicate this simple

picture. He again asserts that “What is essential to any moral worth of actions is that the moral

law determine the will immediately,”49

thus suggesting that the determination of the will by the

moral law must itself be the cause of anything else involved in moral motivation, including any

conscious feeling of respect. But he now elaborates a more complicated phenomenology of the

feeling of respect, suggesting that it intervenes between the immediate determination of the

moral law and the actual performance of a morally mandated action: he states that “the moral

law, as the determining ground of the will, must by thwarting all our inclinations produce a

feeling that can be called pain” but also produce a “positive feeling,” and that by these means

“the moral law deprives self-love of its influence...and thereby the hindrance to pure practical


reason is lessened and the representation of the superiority of its objective law to the impulses of

sensibility is produced.”50

The idea seems to be that the determination of the will by the moral

law leads to action by reweighting our natural incentives: it makes the naturally pleasurable

prospect of indulging our own inclinations painful and transforms the naturally painful prospect

of thwarting our own inclinations into the pleasurable prospect of living up to the moral law, and

this realignment of our prospects for pleasure and pain is what leads to our dutiful action. Here

it looks as if the Kantian moment of the determination of the will by pure reason has to pass

through a Humean mechanism of the motivation of action by prospects of pleasure and pain.

Now on the transcendental idealist theory of freedom of the will that Kant had presented

as at least possible in the Critique of Pure Reason and asserted in Section III of the Groundwork,

the determination of the will by the moral law would take place at the noumenal level, and

manifest itself to consciousness -- that is, our empirical selves -- in whatever moral reasoning

and decision-making we consciously engage in but also in these modifications of our natural

propensities to feelings of pleasure and pain. But that is not a problem, since Kant explicitly

asserts that “every determination of [our] existence changing conformably with inner sense, even

the whole sequence of [our] existence as a sensible being,”51

is the product of our noumenal

choice, and there is no need for him to restrict the effects of our purely rational noumenal choice

to reason or reasoning as an empirical phenomenon, as contrasted to feeling.52

But the

inscrutability of the relation between noumenal choice and its phenomenal consequences also

means that the former gives us no information about the latter, and in fact Kant must rely solely

on empirical data for his theory of the phenomenal character of moral motivation.

Transcendental idealism may remain in place as a background guarantee that every human being

is always free to choose to do the right thing, but it plays no further role in the development of

Kant‟s model of the phenomenology of moral motivation. Even if the choice to be moral is

entirely noumenal and free, experience teaches us that moral action comes about by reason

working with rather than against our native inclinations.


This insight is considerably refined in Kant‟s last published work in moral philosophy,

the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Introduction to the “Doctrine of Virtue” in this work, Kant

does not us as being moved to moral action by a single even if complex feeling of respect that is

produced by reasoning about the moral law. Instead, he portrays us as being moved to perform

the particular actions called for by morality by a panoply of feelings or more precisely “aesthetic

preconditions” that are both “cultivated,” that is, strengthened, and “conditioned,” that is,

constrained when necessary, by our conscious reflection on the moral law and what it requires of

us.53

In the Introduction to the “Doctrine of Virtue” of this last work, Kant enumerates four

“aesthetic and antecedent but natural predispositions of the mind (praedispositio) for being

affected by concepts of duty,” “tendencies” (Anlagen) that we have to possess naturally in order

to be able to be moved to action by concepts of duty but that must also be strengthened and

guided by our thought about duty.54

These are “moral feeling,” a general “susceptibility to feel

pleasure or displeasure merely from being aware that our actions are consistent with or contrary

to the law of duty,”55

which plays the role of what Kant earlier called respect; “conscience,” not

so much a feeling but a disposition to hold particular actions that suggests themselves to us up to

the moral law for “acquittal or condemnation”;56

“love” of other human beings, a feeling of

pleasure in the idea of doing good to them; and “respect,” now in the sense of “self-esteem”

(Selbstschätzung), a “feeling (which is of a special kind) [that] is the basis of certain...actions

that are consistent with [one‟s] duty to himself.”57

Our obligation is “to cultivate” each of these

“aesthetic” feelings or propensities so that they will be strong enough to move us to action when

needed; in the case of conscience, for example, our duty “is to cultivate one‟s conscience, to

sharpen one‟s attentiveness to the voice of the inner judge and to use every means to obtain a

hearing for it,” and something similar holds for the others. It is important to recognize that the

cultivation of these propensities is not merely a back-up in case the sheer determination of the

will by the moral law fails us; even if the idea of the determination of the will by the moral law

alone at the noumenal level makes sense, being moved to action by these feelings once they have

been adequately cultivated is the way that the determination of the will by the moral law actually


moves us to action at the phenomenal level. This is Kant‟s ultimate accommodation of Hume

and the other moral sense theorists.

In a further rapproachement with his Scottish rivals, Kant adds, or perhaps further

specifies the feeling of love towards others as, “sympathetic joy and sadness (sympathia

moralis)...sensible feelings of pleasure or displeasure (which are therefore to be called

„aesthetic‟) at another‟s state of joy or pain.” “Nature,” he continues, “has already implanted in

human beings receptivity to these feelings...as a means to promoting active and rational

benevolence,” that is, actual performance of beneficent actions.58

He reiterates that we have a

duty to “cultivate” these “compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings” so that we can reliably

“make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on moral principles.”59

But as the last

clause, as well as his statement that to use sympathy “as a means to promoting active and rational

benevolence is still a particular, though only a conditional, duty”60

imply, our duty is not only to

cultivate these natural propensities in the name of or out of respect for the moral law, so they will

be able to move us to particular actions when we need them; we must also always make action

upon them conditional with their compliance with the moral law, that is, watch out that the

actions they would move us to are in fact morally correct. After all, sometimes love or

sympathy or self-esteem could prompt us to do something we should not; in Barbara Herman‟s

famous example, our natural and well-cultivated sympathy might move us to help someone

struggling to move a heavy package out of the back door of a museum late at night, when we

should be calling the police.61

Conscience may be the “aesthetic predisposition” that plays this

particular role of reminding us to check whether the actions to which we are prompted by the

other, well-cultivated “aesthetic predispositions” is in fact morally appropriate. Whether or not

this detail is correct, the general point remains that the normal way for us to make the moral law

effective in our lives is not by ignoring our feelings, but by cultivating our natural receptivity to

concepts of duty while also making sure that the actions to which our cultivated propensities

impel us are in fact the ones that duty demands.


Now, how does all this relate to my original claim that Kant grounds the possibility of

morality on a passion for one‟s own freedom that must be refined into a sentiment in behalf of

the freedom of all without loosing its original impetus? First, recall that in his courses in

anthropology Kant reported that every human being displays a passion for his or her own

freedom, already present in the baby‟s “loud cries, unlike all other animals, simply because it

regards its inability to make use of its limbs as a constraint, and thus it immediately announces

its claim to freedom.”62

This passion, as we saw, is fundamental in the sense that it underlies all

more particular desires and passions: we want to satisfy our particular desires, but above all

because they are our own, and if the inclination for freedom “cannot be satisfied then neither can

any of our other desires.”63

This primeval passion is entirely self-regarding, unlike the aesthetic

preconditions of susceptibility to duty that Kant enumerated in the “Doctrine of Virtue.” But

along with this passion, reason is also natural to human beings, and naturally develops as they

mature, and as “reason gradually develops instinct looses its domination,” although “instinct

remains in place” while “reason receives more power over it.”64

In other words, the passion for

freedom is not simply replaced by reason, but gradually becomes governed by reason. Since

reason teaches us that we are not significantly different from each other -- as it taught Descartes

that we are all similar in intelligence or Hobbes that we are all similar in strength -- it teaches us

that the freedom of anyone of us is worth neither more nor less than the freedom of any other.

As this insight sinks in during the process of maturation, the impetus originally attached to the

idea of our own freedom should be transferred to the idea of the freedom of all, and the

“inclination to persist in” our own “outer freedom” should become transformed into “an affect,

which is called enthusiasm,” for “the concept of freedom under moral laws,”65

that is, for

self-consistent freedom, for the greatest use of freedom, or for the maximum of freedom for both

oneself and others, without loosing its original motivational force. Our original passion for

freedom needs to be and at least according to Kant is gradually corrected by reason, but without

that passion, now transformed into a more rational enthusiasm, we could not act in behalf of the

freedom of all. (Kant often uses “enthusiasm” as a perjorative name for passion, but here he


turns to it as a positive term for properly refined passion.) Our enthusiasm for the freedom of all

is what plays the ultimate motivational role in Kant‟s mature moral theory analogous to Hume‟s

calm pass for tranquility.

I personally find Kant‟s theory that we have a noumenally free will that always allows us

to do the right thing no matter what our inclinations a fairy-tale. But I find his empirical theory

that we come to be able to act morally only by refining and cultivating our native inclination

toward our own freedom entirely plausible. To be sure, insofar as it is empirical, this theory

offers no guarantee that everyone will redirect their passion toward their own freedom toward the

freedom of all, and many do not seem to do so. But at least this theory gives us a starting-point

for moral education, which Kant‟s theory of the noumenally free will hardly does. I‟ll take that

over a meaningless guarantee of free will any day.


Notes

1 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J, Norton

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Book II, Part III, section iii, paragraph 4, p. 266 (in the

style to be used henceforth, 2.2.3.4, p. 266).

2 Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.16, pp. 297-8.

3 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork [for] the Metaphysics of Morals, Preface, 4:389; in Immanuel

Kant, Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), p. 45.

4 Kant, Groundwork, Section I, 4:400-1; Gregor, pp. 55-6.

5 Kant, Groundwork, Section I, 4:401n; Gregor, p. 56n.

6 Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1, title, p. 293.

7 For these terms, see David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, edited by

Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), Section 4, Part 1, paragraph 1, p. 24.

8 Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3.2, p. 265.

9 Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3.3, p. 266.

10 Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3.6, p. 267.

11 Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3.6, p. 267. Hutcheson had put the point without Hume‟s colorful

examples when he wrote in Illustrations upon the Moral Sense that “all exciting Reasons

presuppose Instincts and Affections...As if indeed Reason, or the Knowledge of the Relations of

things, could excite to Action when we proposed no End, or as if Ends could be intended without


Desire or Affections”; Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions

and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, edited by Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis:

Liberty Fund, p. 2002), Treatise II, Section I, pp. 138-9.

12 Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.6, p. 294.

13 Hume, Treatise, 3.1.2.4, p. 303.

14 Hume, Treatise, 2.3.4.8, pp. 267-8.

15 Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.15, p. 371.

16 Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.28, p. 377.

17 Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.24, p. 375.

18 David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), sections 5-8.

19 Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 6, Part 1, especially paragraph

13, p. 50.

20 Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, section 8.

21 Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 7, paragraph 16, p. 63.

22 Kant, Groundwork, 4:389; Gregor, p. 45.

23 Kant, Groundwork, 4:401n; Gregor, p. 56.

24 Kant, Groundwork, 4:425; Gregor, p. 76.


25 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §73, 7:251; in Anthropology, History,

and Education, edited by Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007), p. 353. (The translation of the Anthropology is by Robert Louden.)

26 Kant, Anthropologie Mrongovius, Winter Semester 1784-85, 25:1353.

27 Kant, Moral Philosophy Collins, 27:254; in Kant, Lectures on Ethics, edited by Peter Heath

and J.B. Schneewind, translated by Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),

p. 49. The Collins transcription is dated “Winter Semester, 1784-85,” but it is virtually identical

with earlier transcriptions, such as that of Kaehler dated “Summer Semester, 1777” (though Kant

gave his ethics course in the winter semester of 1777-78, not the preceding summer semester; see

the edition of these notes Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie, edited by Werner Stark [Berlin:

Walter de Gruyter, 2004]), while it differs substantially from the notes for the first part of the

course by Mrongovius dated January 3, 1785. The explanation of these facts appears to be that

Collins made or acquired notes from an earlier offering of the course; most likely both the

Collins and Kaehler notes were copied from a common original, perhaps dating back to the

course from 1775-75.

28 Kant, Naturrecht Feyerabend, 27:1321; these lectures are dated “Summer Semester, 1784, but

the course catalogues of the university at Könisgberg show that Kant lectured on natural right in

the following semester, the same semester he gave the anthropology lectures recorded by

Mrongovius and at the end of which the Groundwork appeared.

29 Kant, Moral Philosophy Collins, 27:346.

30 Kant, Anthropology Mrongovius, 25:1354.

31 Kant, Anthropology Busolt, 25:1520.


32 See Kant, An Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and

Morality, Fourth Reflection, §2, 2:298-9; in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, edited by

David Walford with the collaboration of Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1992), pp. 272-3.

33 See Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,

Treatise II, Section III, paragraph 1; edited by Wolfgang Leidhold, revised edition (Indianapolis:

Liberty Fund, 2008), pp. 116-17.

34 Kant, note after Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 2:246; cited from

Kant, Notes and Fragments, edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer,

and Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 16-17.

35 See for example the notes at Observations 2:215-16 and 225-6, in Notes and Fragments, pp. 6

and 10.

36 Kant, note opposite Observations 2:230, in Notes and Fragments, p. 12.

37 Kant, Reflection 6596 (1764-68), 19:101; Notes and Fragments, p . 420.






43 Kant, Groundwork, Section II, 4:421; Practical Philosophy, p. 73.


44 Kant, Groundwork, Section II, 4:429; Practical Philosophy, p. 80.

45 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Introduction, Section VIII, 6:392; Practical

Philosophy, p. 522.

46 See Kant, Groundwork, Section II, 4:421n; Practical Philosophy, p. 73n.

47 Kant‟s examples of the four classes of duties are provided at Groundwork, Section II, 4:421-3

and 4429-30; Practical Philosophy, pp. 73-5 and 80-1. I have argued for the present approach

to these examples in “Kant‟s System of Duties,” chapter 10 of Kant’s System of Nature and

Freedom: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 243-74, especially pp. 255-7,

and Kant (London: Routledge, 2006), chapter 7, pp. 239-61.

48 Kant, Groundwork, 4:401n; Practical Philosophy, p. 56n.

49 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:71; Practical Philosophy, p. 198.

50 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:73 and 75-6; Practical Philosophy, p. 199 and 201.

51 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:97-8; Practical Philosophy, p. 218.

52 I first developed this argument in “Duty and Inclination,” chapter 10 of Kant and the

Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 335-93, especially

pp. 361-5.

53 I have discussed Kant‟s final account of moral motivation more fully in “Moral Feelings in

the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Lara Denis, editor, Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical

Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 130-51.

54 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Section XII, 6:399; Practical Philosophy, p.

528, translation modified.


55 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Section XIIa, 6:399; Practical Philosophy,

p. 528.

56 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Section XIIb, 6:400; Practical Philosophy,

p. 529.

57 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Section XIId, 6:402-3; Practical

Philosophy, p. 531.

58 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, §34, 6:456; Practical Philosophy, pp.

574-5.

59 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, §35, 6:457; Practical Philosophy, pp. 575.

60 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, §34, 6:456; Practical Philosophy, p. 575.

61 Barbara Herman, “On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,” Philosophical Review

90 (1981): 359-82; reprinted in Herman The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 1-22, at pp. 4-5.

62 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §82, 7:268; Anthropology, History, and

Education, p. 369.

63 Kant, Anthropology Mrongovius, 25:1355.

64 Kant, Menschenkunde, 25:1123-4.

65 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §82, 7:269; Anthropology, History,

Education, p. 370.

Ten myths of gifted education - Dr Louise Porter

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