Kant on Maxims and Moral Motivation by Peter Herissone-Kelly

Author:Peter Herissone-Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030055721
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

An implication of this would seem to be that the maxim one adopts upon heeding a hypothetical imperative is not simply some distinct principle mentioned in that imperative’s consequent. Rather, it is that very imperative itself. Now, the most obvious objection to this claim can be dealt with swiftly enough. That is, we want to say that a maxim cannot simply be some hypothetical imperative, since principles of the latter type tell agents what they ought to do, while principles of the former type represent personal determinations to act in certain ways. The contrast here is between a principle’s recommending ‘you ought,’ and its declaring ‘I will’. But it seems to me that it would be perfectly coherent to claim that a maxim just is a particular objective principle divested of its imperatival form, and restated as a personal determination.

Nonetheless, we need to ask how a hypothetical imperative would look following such a transformation, and whether it would display the form—captured in M—that is distinctive of a Kantian maxim of action . If I am correct in holding that the form of a hypothetical imperative is ‘If you will the end E, then you ought to Φ in F-type situations,’ then any such principle transformed into a maxim would have the form ‘If I will the end E, then I will Φ in F-type situations’. Alternatively, given that the end E can be presupposed in anyone who has heeded such a hypothetical imperative , we might want to give the form of the subjectively adopted principle as ‘Given that I will the end E, I will Φ in F-type situations’. It is but a small step from this last principle to ME, the candidate for the form of a maxim of action that I introduced, and dismissed, in the previous chapter: ‘For any obtaining situation s, if s is an F-type situation, then I will Φ in order to achieve end E’. The belief that adoption of a maxim involves just such a transformation of a hypothetical imperative, combined with Kant’s claim about the relationship between objective and subjective principles, may perhaps underlie Rawls ’ beliefs, reported in Sect. 3.​2, that (a) maxims of action are instances of ME, and (b) maxims just are particular hypothetical imperatives.79

However, I also argued at some length in that section and Sect. 3.​4 that we ought not to accept ME as the form of a maxim of action . I gave various reasons for this recommendation, the most straightforward of which was simply that none of the examples Kant gives of maxims of action exemplifies ME. That being the case, I think that, if we can avoid the conclusion that maxims just are transformed hypothetical imperatives , then we should. And, as it happens, I think that we can avoid that conclusion, if we attend more carefully to precisely what Kant says in his footnote.

First of all, we need to be aware of the setting in which the footnote appears. Kant introduces the note

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