The Kantian idea of hope – Bridging the gap between our imperfection and our duty to perfect ourselves

Abstract

This journal recently published a special issue on Kant, evil, moral perfection and education. The essays included in the special issue discussed the vulnerably and imperfection of human beings and the role of education as facilitating such beings in their pursuit of moral perfection. The contribution of this article is to put forward a Kantian idea of hope as a response to the difficulty of holding imperfect agents to an impossibly high standard (perfect virtue). Hope plays an enabling role for human agents, mediating the seemingly unstable relationship between imperfect moral agents, characterised by radical evil, and their duty to elevate themselves to the idea of moral perfection in an uncertain world. As such, hope can be seen as a response to the editors’ call to bring attention to the need to work with the vulnerabilities and imperfections of human beings through education and social change. One practical way in which education can accomplish this task is through role modelling. A further contribution of this article is to advocate a Kantian idea of impure role modelling (the role model as imperfect but hopeful).

Keywords:

• Immanuel Kant
• hope
• imperfection
• radical evil
• moral perfection
• role modelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It would seem that, for Kant, there is a relationship between weakness of will and evil. For a discussion of the three grades of evil, and how weakness of will is related to radical evil, see Roth (2018).

2 The speech is an attempt, by Himmler, to address the difficulties SS officers face in executing the final solution. In it he congratulates the officers for maintaining decency in the face of their task. The final lines state: I will never see it happen that even one … bit of putrefaction comes in contact with us, or takes root in us. On the contrary, where it might try to take root, we will burn it out together. But altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, in our character.

3 Cardinal Pell might be viewed as a contemporary example of this sort of moral frailty. As a powerful member of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Pell might have served as a paradigm of moral behaviour, consistent with his free power of choice. Rather, his conviction seems to highlight his moral frailty.

4 For the purposes of this paper, I will be understanding hope and faith as similar insofar as they are species of belief, and as such share the same structure.

Additional information

Notes on contributor

Katy Dineen has a PhD from the London School of Economics. Her thesis, ‘A Non-Contingent Concept of Connectedness for Cosmopolitanism’, examined the foundations of contemporary cosmopolitan theories and argued that such theories could benefit from a Kantian approach. In particular, Kantian ideas of moral agency could prove useful for cosmopolitan theorists. Katy’s interests include character education, Kantian and Aristotelian accounts of virtue and character, vulnerability, cosmopolitanism and neurodiversity.