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Making Sense of the Relationship of Reason and Sensibility in Kant's Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2011

Jeanine Grenberg
Jeanine Grenberg
Affiliation:
St Olaf College
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Abstract

In this essay, I look at some claims Anne Margaret Baxley makes, in her recent book Kant's Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy, about the relationship between reason and sensibility in Kant's theory of virtue. I then reflect on tensions I find in these claims as compared to the overall goal of her book: an account of Kant's conception of virtue as autocracy. Ultimately, I argue that interpreters like Baxley (and myself) who want to welcome a more robust role for feeling in Kantian ethics must, in order to achieve our purposes, move beyond the general account of the limits for the role of the moral feeling of respect in the grounding of Kant's ethics which Henry Allison established in his influential Kant's Theory of Freedom.

Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , 28 September 2011 , pp. 461 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 2011

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References

1 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. All references to Kant's works will note the Akademie edition pagination, followed by the pagination of the Cambridge editions of the English translation of it.

2 Henry Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. I refer to this work throughout this piece as Allison, followed by page citations.

3 See review of Baxley in Notre Dame Philosophical Review, 3 May 2011.

4 Kant's doctrine of the moral feeling of ‘respect presupposes the doctrine of the Fact of Reason, since it assumes the validity of the moral law and investigates the effects of the consciousness of this law on sensuously affected rational agents’ (Allison, 237; emphases added)

5 See, for example, 4: 460–1/64, where Kant says ‘reason ha[s] the capacity to induce a feeling of pleasure or of delight in the fulfillment of duty, and thus there is required a causality of reason to determine sensibility in conformity with its principles’. In the second Critique, Kant states that ‘since respect is an effect on feeling and hence on the sensibility of a rational being, it presupposes this sensibility and so too the finitude of such beings on whom the moral law imposes respect’ (5: 76/65). He thus confirms not only that the moral feeling of respect ‘presupposes’ sensibility, but is also an influence on sensibility. Even in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant speaks of the capacity for sensibility itself being affected by reason: ‘Susceptibility to the representation is called feeling, which is the effect of a representation (that may be either sensible or intellectual) upon a subject and belongs to sensibility, even though the representation itself may belong to the understanding or reason’ (6: 212n./12n.; second emphasis added)

6 See Baxley, 145, where Baxley sets aside consideration of either the Groundwork or the second Critique, saying that ‘apart from his extended account of respect in the second Critique, in the Groundwork and the second Critique, Kant is not concerned to set out a full account of the way in which feelings and desires can be products of pure practical reason and play a role in the execution of duty’. The setting aside of these works is unsatisfactory, especially since Baxley herself admits that we do find an extended account of such issues in the ‘extended account of respect in the second Critique’.

7 ‘[Moral feeling] is the susceptibility to feel pleasure or displeasure merely from being aware that our actions are consistent with or contrary to the law of duty’ (6: 399/160).

8 This brief discussion does, furthermore, raise more problems than it solves. When, for example, Baxley claims both that respect ‘follows from our recognition of the moral law’ and that it ‘grounds our consciousness of moral obligation’ (Baxley, 153; emphases added), we find ourselves once again facing the ambiguity of whether moral feelings are constitutive of our consciousness of the moral law, or a mere effect of such consciousness.

9 See 5: 90/76, where Kant says that he could introduce ‘moral feeling’ only after affirming ‘the possibility of practical principles a priori’ (emphases removed)