The Development of Kant's View of Ethics by Ward Keith;

Author:Ward, Keith; [Ward, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2019-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

6.3 THE UNION OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY

The hope for future happiness is necessary to moral action, in the sense that man’s nature, as at once a moral and a sensuous being, a member of the phenomenal and the intelligible worlds, would be brought into contradiction with itself if such a hope were illusory. One would be forced to say that the fulfilment of the moral law was at the same time the denial of an important part of one’s nature; such fulfilment would then be senseless, in that it would come to seem an arbitrary and unintelligible imposition of abstract reason upon man’s sensuous being.

For Kant, if man consents to be determined to action by his desires, whatever they may be, then he is heteronomously determined; he abnegates his true character as a rationally determinable being. The legislation of the moral law which man himself creates is the true expression of man’s autonomy and superiority over the sensuous bounds nature has set him. It is in such legislation that he begins to realise his transcendentally free nature and fulfil himself as a distinctively human person. The law of duty is thus known, practically, as supremely authoritative. All men, Kant holds, can come to know the obligatoriness of this law, in their own experience. For, in coming to know it, they are just coming to realise the full dignity of their own natures, as men. To realise his true humanity, man must act solely out of respect for this law of his own essential being.

But what if the law of autonomy is seen to contradict every object or fulfilment of man’s sensuous nature? What if it imposes categorically upon every man the necessity of attaining absolute moral worth; but this is completely without relation to happiness or possible consequences? Why should the mere cultivation of such an inner disposition be at all important? As Kant is reported to have said in his Lectures on Ethics, ‘Only God can see that our dispositions are moral and pure, and if there were no God, why ought we to cherish these dispositions?’ (LE, 80; Vor. 100.)

He is not querying the fact that one intuitively perceives the obligation to cultivate a holy will to be categorically imposed upon one. But he is querying the validity of those intuitions themselves, and suggesting the possibility that they may be delusory and unreasonable. For what they obligate one to attain is a holy will—something which in any case Kant holds to be finally unattainable in this life, and something which concerns the inner disposition, the personal worth of a man, rather than the nature of the world which is to be affected by his moral acts. Indeed, it is Kant’s explicit doctrine that ‘Even if … this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose … and there should remain only the good will … like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light.’ (G, 11; Ber. 4, 394.) But the cultivation of such a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.