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Kant's Incorporation Requirement: Freedom and Character in the Empirical World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Richard McCarty
Richard McCarty*
Affiliation:
East Carolina University, Greenville, NC27858, USA
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Extract

In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant wrote that ‘freedom of the power of choice has the characteristic, entirely peculiar to it, that it cannot be determined to action through any incentive except insofar as the human being has incorporated it into his maxim.’ This is an obscure statement, in both meaning and provenance. Yet almost all recent interpreters of Kant's practical philosophy find it crucial for understanding his theories of freedom and motivation, since it seems to indicate what we are required to do in order to act by our own free choice. Here I refer to Kant's statement expressing the requirement that incentives be incorporated into maxims as his ‘incorporation requirement.’ How that requirement is best understood will be the leading question in what follows: a question I shall answer by showing why the incorporation requirement, and Kant's theories of freedom and motivation, should be understood differently from the way they are now usually understood.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 425 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2008

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References

1 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 49/6:23-24. Subsequent references to Religion refer to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

2 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), A554-5/B582-3. Subsequent references to Pure Reason, or to the first Critique, refer to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

3 John R. Silber, ‘The Ethical Significance of Kant's Religion,’ in Immanuel Kant, ReligionWithin the Limits of Reason Alone, Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, trans. (New York: Harper & Row 1960), lxxix-cxxxiv, esp. xcv-xcvi. Prior to Silber's introductory article the incorporation requirement had been discussed briefly in H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1948), 275.

4 See John Rawls, Lectures in the History of Moral Philosophy, Barbara Herman, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000), 294.

5 See Gerold Prauss, Kant über Freiheit als Autonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Kolstermann 1983), 93-4; and Henry E. Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), 189. Allison gave the name ‘Incorporation Thesis’ to what Rawls had called the ‘Principle of Election.’ See also Andrews Reath, ‘Kant's Theory of Moral Sensibility,’ Kant-Studien 80 (1989) 284-302, 290n, and Allison, (1990), 126.

6 See Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 162, 165; See also Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, Onora O'Neill, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 94; Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), 293-4; and Allen W. Wood, Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), 51-3. Earlier, Wood defended an interpretation of Kant's theory of freedom seemingly antithetical to the Incorporation Thesis. See ‘Kant's Compatibilism’ in Allen W. Wood, ed., Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1984), 73-101.

7 Bittner quipped: ‘An incentive that cannot determine the will unless the agent has [incorporated it into] his maxim is in fact an incentive that cannot determine the will, period’; see Rüdiger Bittner, Doing Things for Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), 47. For some other conceptual problems related to the Incorporation Thesis see my ‘The Maxims Problem,’ Journal of Philosophy 99 (January 2002) 29-44.

8 Silber's interpretation was that we are always caused to act by the impulsive strength of our incentives, though it is we who freely choose their relative strengths (see xcv).

9 Cf. Allison (1990), 51, 189; and Guyer (2000), 293.

10 There is a possibility that it is sometimes one's duty to incorporate certain inclinational incentives. On this point see Guyer (2000), 298-303.

11 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics, Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon, trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), 380/28:678. Maxims were called ‘maioribus propositionibus syllogisorum practicorum’ in the Latin textbook Kant used in this ethics courses: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ethica Philosophica (1751), §§246, 449; see Immanuel Kant, Kant's gesammelte Schriften, vol. 27, pt. 2, no.1 (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter 1975), 800, 857. See also my ‘Maxims in Kant's Practical Philosophy,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 44 (2006) 65-83.

12 ChristianWolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen, zu beföderungIhrer Glückseeligkeit (Frankfurt, 1733; facsimile, Hildesheim: Georg Olms 1976), §§190, 400.

13 Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen,Auch Allen Dingen Überhaupt (Halle, 1751; facsimile, Hildesheim: Georg Olms 1983). ‘Das erste Register’ (glossary) of this text equates German Bewegungsgrund with Latin Motivum.

14 Ibid., §492; emotions (Affecten), according to Wolff, are just exceptionally strong, sense-based desires; see also §439.

15 Kant at least once provided an example in which a principle he called a maxim seems to function like the major premise of a syllogism. ‘I have, for example, made it my maxim to increase my wealth by every safe means. Now I have a deposit in my hands, the owner of which has died and left no record of it. This is, naturally, a case for my maxim.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Mary Gregor, trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), 25/5:27. Subsequent references to Practical Reason refer to this edition.

16 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor, trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 32/4:422

17 It would be more accurate to say here, ‘My happiness is good.’ But because Kant expressed his example of the suicide maxim in terms of ‘self-love,’ I have followed suit. It will become evident below that the subject term of a maxim can be expressed for certain purposes objectively, referring to an object or state of affairs like ‘my happiness,’ and for other purposes subjectively, referring to a motivational state or disposition like ‘self-love.’

18 Kant probably compressed everything into just the one maxim of his example in order to demonstrate the supposed practical contradiction of suicide from selflove; see Groundwork, (1998), 31-32/4:421-23.

19 It is important to bear in mind that the final, motivating conclusion of practical reasoning is not a maxim. Maxims, as major premises, can generate motivation only by our subsuming particular information under them: in this case, information about the effects of performing a particular action, here and now. Wolff and Kant used terms like ‘Bewegungs-Gründe’ or ‘Beweg-Ursachen’ for the motivating conclusions derived from maxims in practical reasoning.

20 Kant compared objective and subjective aspects of the concept of ‘incentive’ in at least two other places: one in a passage quoted at the end of this section, where the moral ‘good’ is said to provide an objectively ‘irresistible’ incentive that is also subjectively ‘weaker’ in comparison with inclination; and another in a lecture example, where a person's choice between two incentive objects (two ducats) is determined by different subjective incentives (Lectures on Metaphysics, 268/29:902).

21 Kant agreed with scholastic thinkers, and with Wolff, that we desire nothing without thinking it good. He endorsed the slogan, ‘Nihil appetimus nisi sub ratione boni’; but in doing so he stressed that ‘boni’ is ambiguous, between natural ‘well-being’ and rational, ‘moral good’ (Practical Reason, 51-52/5:59-60).

22 Maxims and the conclusions that follow from them through practical reasoning evaluate objects (ends) and ways of acting (means) simply as ‘good.’ But comparative maxims expressing evaluations of ‘better’ and ‘best’ are possible also. An example would be: ‘Confronting students I suspect of having cheated is better than avoiding it because I don't like it’; or, simply, ‘Confronting students I suspect of having cheated is always best.’

23 Allison's response to this evident counterexample to the Incorporation Thesis has been to interpret it as illustrating a case of self-deception. But he has not adequately explained what deception, what mis-believed proposition, is supposed to be illustrated by Kant's use of the example of the Apostle's lament. One explanation he gives has it that the Apostle is deceiving himself into thinking that he is not responsible for his moral transgression, owing to moral weakness (Kant's Theory of Freedom, 159). But this reading is entirely contrary to the spirit of Romans 7, where, as Kant presumably knew, St. Paul calls himself ‘wretched’ in a fit of self-reproach. He is not there attempting to exonerate himself on account of his weakness, as Allison seems to suggest. For more on this point see my ‘Moral Weakness as Self-Deception,’ in Hoke Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press 1995), 587-93.

24 Pure Reason, A549/B577. See also Practical Reason, 83/5:99, where Kant compares human behavior to predictable lunar and solar eclipses

25 See Kant's comment on the ‘road of endless progress toward holiness’ (Religion, 67/6:47).

26 ‘[A]ccording to the cognition we have of the human being from experience, he cannot be judged otherwise’ (ibid., 56/6:32).

27 Kant anticipated that some would ask about the possible ‘reasons’ or maxims behind the original choice. His response was that in the regressive series of maxims behind our particular empirical choices we must come ultimately to a noumenal end. Though we cannot avoid asking about the antecedents of the final choice in the regress, the fact is that we can have no insight into this. Kant would say that the same is true about, for example, why human beings experience the world in threedimensional space. See Religion, 50/6:25, and Pure Reason, A556-7/B584-5.

28 Jonathan Bennett, for example, called a version of this interpretation presented by Allen Wood ‘flawless.’ See Jonathan Bennett, ‘Kant's Theory of Freedom,’ in Allen W. Wood, ed., Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy, 102-12, 102. See also Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005), 301-61.

29 The more popular alternative these days interprets Kant's noumenon-phenomenon distinction as merely methodological or epistemological: as a ‘two-aspect’ theory, rather than a ‘two-worlds’ theory. Cf. Henry E. Allison, ‘Transcendental Idealism: The “Two Aspect” View,’ in Bernard den Ouden and Marcia Moen, eds., New Essays on Kant (New York: Peter Lang 1987), 155-78.

30 Bennett, 102. Cf. also Meerbote: ‘The notion of [a timeless free choice] is intrinsically puzzling, since it is the notion of something coming about in an agent, but timelessly so. We normally view any coming-about as temporal, and we normally take any reason from which an agent acts to obtain temporally before or during his (temporal) performance.’ Ralf Meerbote, ‘Which Freedom?’ in Predrag Cicvacki, ed., Kant's Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press 2001), 197-225, 207. Kemp Smith raised a similar objection to Kant's resolution of the Third Antinomy: ‘A solution is rendered impossible by the very terms in which he formulates the problem. If the spiritual and the natural be opposed to one another as the timeless and the temporal, and if the natural be further viewed as a unitary system, individual moral freedom is no longer defensible.’ Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to ‘Kant's Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press 1962), 518. Cf. also H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative, 274.

31 Meerbote, 208. Here Meerbote credits and cites Hud Hudson, Kant's Compatibilism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1994), 25.

32 ‘The form of the world is a real connection because it is a real whole. For if we have a multitude of substances, then these must also stand together in connection, otherwise they would be isolated. Isolated substances, however, never constitute a whole’ (Lectures on Metaphysics, 208/29:851).

33 ‘[B]ecause the substances in the world stand in interaction [commercio] and find themselves in action and reaction, then each, or rather its state, is dependent upon the action of another’ (ibid., 210/19: 852, cf. also 20/28:196). Kant used the ideas of interaction, community, or reciprocal determination in Pure Reason's third analogy of experience to account for co-existence of objects in the phenomenal world (A211-15/B256-262).

34 Ralph C.S. Walker, Kant: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978), 149; cf. also Bennett, 102-4.

35 See Wood, ‘Kant's Compatibilism,’ 92.

36 Kant may seem to have said otherwise at one point in the first Critique, where empirical character seems to be called an effect of other appearances: ‘Because this empirical character itself must be drawn from appearances as effect, and from the rule which experience provides….’ (A549/B577, emphasis added). But it makes no sense that a law of empirical causality, which is how empirical character is defined, should be derived or inferred as an effect of appearances. Kant wrote here: ‘dieser empirische Charakter selbst aus den Erscheinungen als Wirkung und aus der Regelderselben, welche Erfahrung an die Hand giebt, gezogen werden muß….’ Kemp Smith's translation reads: ‘this empirical character must itself be discovered from the appearanceswhich are its effect and from the rule to which experience shows them to conform….’ (emphasis added). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press 1965).

37 Cf., Lectures on Metaphysics, 364/28:663, where Kant admits that human beings are subject to ‘fate’ at least in the empirical world, although not to blind chance.

38 Kant is careful to embrace determinism and reject predeterminism; see ibid., 488-89/29:1020-21.

39 Wood, ‘Kant's Compatibilism,’ 96

40 Kant suggested this in part of his famous argument against the possibility of a science of empirical psychology: ‘even observation by itself already changes and displaces the state of the observed object.’ See Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundationsof Natural Science, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, Henry Allison and Peter Heath, eds., Michael Friedman, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 186/4:471; and Lectures on Metaphysics, 381/28:679.

41 Cf. Religion, 55/6:31, where Kant explains the equivocal use of ‘deed.’

42 See Guyer, 293-4; Wood, Kant's Ethical Thought, 51-53; and Marcia Baron, KantianEthics, Almost without Apology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1995), 134-5, 188-93.

43 See Richard Henson, ‘What Kant Might Have Said: Moral Worth and the Overdetermination of Dutiful Action,’ Philosophical Review 88 (1979) 39-54; Barbara Herman, ‘On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,’ in The Practice of MoralJudgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993) 1-22; and Paul Benson, ‘Moral Worth,’ Philosophical Studies 51 (1987) 365-82.

44 See Nelson Potter, ‘Kant and the Moral Worth of Actions,’ The Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (1996) 225-41; Walter E. Schaller, ‘Should Kantians Care about Moral Worth?’ Dialogue 32 (1993) 25-40; and Allison, (1990), 120.

45 See Baron, (1995), 129-45; Philip Stratton-Lake, Kant, Duty and Moral Worth (London: Routledge 2000), 60-77; and Guyer, (2000), 287-329.

46 Kant talks about virtue as a ‘phenomenon’ in Religion, (1998), 67/6:47.

47 Kant seems often to equate ‘virtue’ and ‘moral worth.’ But he used ‘virtue’ in two senses, one formal and one material: one corresponding to what he called the single ‘obligation of virtue,’ and one corresponding to the multiple ‘duties of virtue.’ So acting dutifully but not from duty would show a shortcoming of virtue in the formal sense; but only in this sense. In the material sense of ‘virtue,’ it would often be appropriate to affirm or deny the virtue of an action without reference to its meeting the criterion for moral worth, just as it is appropriate to affirm or deny the rightness of an action without referring to its moral worth.

48 Roughly the same distinction is implicit in the Groundwork's distinction between ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect duties’ (31n/4:421n).

49 See Karl Ameriks, ‘Recent Work on Kant's Theoretical Philosophy,’ American PhilosophicalQuarterly 19 (1982) 1-23. For a discussion of this issue specifically in relation to the problem of freedom and determinism, see Watkins, 317-25.

50 See, for example, Robert Paul Wolff, ‘Remarks on the Relation of the Critique of Pure Reason to Kant's Ethical Theory,’ in Bernard den Ouden and Marcia Moen, eds., New Essays on Kant, 139-53; and Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’sCritique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1960), 191-4.