Autonomy and radical evil: a Kantian challenge to constitutivism

Abstract

Properly understood, Kant’s moral philosophy is incompatible with constitutivism. According to the constitutivist, being subject to the moral law cannot be a matter of free choice, and failure to comply with it is to be understood as a deficiency in one’s integrity as an intentional agent. I reconstruct Kant’s arguments to the conclusion that immorality, moral evil, consists in choosing to give one’s unity as an intentional agent supremacy over the moral law, and that one’s being subject to the moral law must be one’s own free choice. And I explain how Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, according to which we cannot be subject to the moral law without actually being morally evil, protects this conclusion from entailing the denial of the unconditionally binding character of moral principles, which character constitutivists correctly identify as the central concern of Kant’s – or any – moral philosophy.

Keywords:

• autonomy
• constitutivism
• morality
• radical evil
• rigorism

Acknowledgements

In writing this paper I profited enormously from the comments I have received from Matthias Haase and an anonymous reviewer; I am incredibly grateful to both. I wrote this paper as a visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago, on leave from Leipzig University; and I wish to express my gratitude to both of these institutions as well as to the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and to James Conant for the generous support that made this stimulating and productive stay possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Proponents of constitutivism about the norms of practical rationality in general include Korsgaard (1996, 1997, 1999, 2008, 2009), Railton 1986), Millgram 1997, ch. 8), Schapiro (1999), Velleman (2000, 2004, 2009) and Rosati 2003). Not all constitutivism is about morality. Velleman’s, for example, is not (2004, 288–9). The most prominent proponent of constitutivism about moral principles is Christine Korsgaard.

2 Kant (1996b, 4:394) envisages the possibility of a whole life of such acts against the will, and he insists that even this may not diminish the moral worth of the person.

3 Note that the validity of this criticism is independent of how Korsgaard tries to derive the categorical imperative from the nature of intentional agency (in chapter 9 of Self-Constitution).

4 This conception of morality is not alien to Aristotle either, who argues that the acts in accordance with virtue the repetition of which contributes to forming a virtuous character, and the actualizations of a character thus formed, must be “chosen and chosen for their own sake” (1998, 1104a31f).

5 The possibility of this objection is anticipated in Railton (1986, in Millgram (2005), and in Fitzpatrick (2005).

6 Korsgaard has not replied to Enoch directly. For various direct constitutivist responses see Ferrero (2009, 2018), Velleman 2009, 142–6), Walden (2012), and Silverstein (2015).

7 I am using the term “call” here partly in order to capture Korsgaard’s insight that the necessity of intentional action for us can be neither causal nor logical nor rational necessity (2009, 1). Katsafanas does not heed this insight when he reduces Korsgaard’s point to a merely analytical truth of the form “living beings live”: “It is not as if the agent can do something other than performing actions” (2013, 52). But clearly, no move could be less helpful in the face of Enoch’s challenge than pointing out that agency is inescapable for agents. – The phrase “to live in response to this call” is supposed to make room for the possibility of phases of non-intentional activity in the life of an intentional agent – stretches of life that are under the call but do not (directly or fully) respond to it –, sleep, inebriation, etc.

8 Though I cannot elaborate this point here, – it might very well be the case that this is the truth of Enoch’s challenge.

9 The constitutivism Sergio Tenenbaum describes as Kantian in his contribution to this issue, “Formalism and Constitutivism in Kantian Practical Philosophy”, is a version of non-Korsgaardian constitutivism in this sense.

10 My translation deviates from the translation of the Religion in the Cambridge Edition. Di Giovanni wrongly translates “Empfänglichkeit der […] Achtung für das moralische Gesetz” (in all of its occurrences) not as “susceptility of respect to the moral law”, but as “susceptibility to […] respect for the moral law”, – which has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of Kant’s notion of respect (I cannot go into here).

11 Haase (2014) argues convincingly that this proposal is also hard to make intelligible in itself, – as it faced with the task of “demonstrating […] that the very distinction between agent and patient that is articulated in the non-reflexive case [in interaction with others] finds an original and non-derivative application in the self-relation of the subject [in interaction with the self]” (121, compare 128-31).

12 Compare Aristotle (1998, 1113a15f) and (1907, 433a28-29).