Chapter 2 - The Highest Good and the Realism of Moral Glaube

Summary

This chapter clarifies how for Kant conforming our desire for happiness to the demands of morality leads to moral Glaube and the postulates of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality. I show that Kant’s conception of moral Glaube can be approached from both an anti-realist and a realist perspective. According to the former, moral Glaube is speculative reason’s “presupposition” of the objects of these Ideas in order to either avoid its own inner contradictions or to help one maintain one’s moral disposition. It is anti-realist in spirit because the assumptions that reason makes may have nothing to do with how things are in reality. However, if closer attention is paid to Kant’s neglected notion of practical cognition additional evidence becomes available for supporting an understanding of Kant as a realist with respect to moral Glaube and for explaining why the anti-realist interpretations do not adequately capture Kant’s view.