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ABSTRACT
In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that, as practical deliberators, we are inescapably conscious of being bound by the moral law. This moral consciousness grounds our right to think of our will as free, from a practical point of view. But it is less clear what justifies our ascriptions of moral personhood and freedom to others. On one common view, harkening back to Fichte, Kant shows only that each of us can prove her- or himself to be free and subject to the moral law, but can offer no argument by which we can prove that others are. I argue that this view overlooks Kant’s crucial insight into the nature of moral agency: the practical point of view is not merely first-personal; it has a complex, multi-faceted structure that provides us with an original practical awareness of others as moral persons and as free. We do not first establish our own personhood and freedom and then extend it to others through a set of analogical inferences. Rather, our moral self-awareness would not be possible without awareness of others as free moral agents and vice versa.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jochen Bojanowski, William Bristow, Markus Kohl, Michael Liston, Julius Sensat, Tamar Shapiro, and Catherine Smith for their helpful comments and discussions of various versions of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at the British Journal of the History of Philosophy for their valuable feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Note on Citation and Abbreviations
References to Kant’s writings are abbreviated as follows:
[Blomberg] Blomberg Logic
[CPR] Critique of Pure Reason
[CPrR] Critique of Practical Reason
[G] Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
[Jäsche] Jäsche Logic
[MM] Metaphysics of Morals
[OP] Opus Postumum
[Prol] Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
[Refl] Reflections
[Rel] Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
References to CPR refer to the standard A/B pagination. Citations of Kant’s other works follow the pagination of the Akademie-Ausgabe (AA, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin).
Notes
1 According to Kant, theoretical reason must assume the logical possibility of the idea of freedom in order to avoid internal contradictions. But, we can have no theoretical knowledge of its content or reality. No a priori theoretical proof and no empirical knowledge of our own or anyone else’s freedom is possible for us. By grounding our practical cognition of freedom, the moral law provides the sole possible moral proof of the reality of this concept and gives it determinate practical meaning as autonomy of the will.
2 In a 1795 letter to Reinhold, Fichte worried that skeptical doubts about ascriptions of rational agency to others may undermine the basic principles of Kant’s moral philosophy: “The objects of my actions are, after all, always appearances in the material world. To which of these appearances should I assign the concept of rationality and to which should I not? “You know the answer to this question all too well,” Kant would have to reply. Correct as this reply is, it is nevertheless anything but a philosophical reply. I ride a horse without asking its permission and without wishing to have it ride me in turn. Why do I have more qualms when it comes to the man who lends me the horse?” (EPW 407–8). See also Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation (EPW 154).
3 For some recent discussion of Fichte’s dissatisfaction with Kant on this point and his efforts to dissolve the problem, see Beiser (German Idealism, 334–374), Wood (Fichte’s Ethical Thought, 85–6), Franks (“The Discovery of the Other”, 175–9), Altman (“Fichte’s Practical Response”). Altman offers a particularly targeted discussion of Fichte’s criticism of Kant’s apparent lack of concern with the problem of the freedom of others. Agreeing with Fichte’s diagnosis, Altman writes:
For Kant, the reality of my own freedom follows in a practical sense from my immediate sense of moral constraint, but the reality of others’ freedom is unavailable to me, both theoretically and practically. Kant is left only with “marks” of rationality that correlate with but do not entail others’ personhood. (Altman, “Fichte's Practical Response”, 1; 3).
4 See, e.g. Bennett (Kant’s Dialectic), Guyer (Virtues of Freedom, 146–62), (Kant on Rationality and Morality, 33), Frierson (Kant’s Empirical Psychology, 167–88), Saunders (“Kant and the Problem of Recognition”), Walker (“Self and Selves”). For alternative treatments that aim to show that our recognition of moral agency of others is (in some sense) immediate, see Kitcher (“A Kantian Argument”; “Guyer and the Value of Freedom”) and Thorpe (“Kant, Guyer, and Tomasello”). While Kitcher puts emphasis on Kant’s account of the activity of judgement, Thorpe focuses on receptive capacities of the mind. He suggests that we have a natural capacity immediately to recognize the humanity of others, which should be thought as reliable on moral grounds (as a postulate of practical reason and the “aesthetic presupposition of morality”).
5 In some recent papers, Patricia Kitcher offers a detailed argument for what Guyer calls a “conceptual necessity” of using one’s own inner life (or, more precisely, one’s own activity of thinking) as a model for representing others as practical agents (Kitcher “A Kantian Argument”; “Guyer and the Value of Freedom”). Kitcher argues that “When [the agent] deliberates about what to do, she is aware of considerations about whether she could will that everyone does what she proposes to do as moving her willing. That is how she knows that she has an efficacious moral law within/is free and so has intrinsic worth. It is also how she understands what practical reasoning is. Since practical deliberation is a species of thinking, Kant must hold that it is inaccessible by the senses. Hence, insofar as one human can understand other humans as engaging in practical deliberation at all, then she must use herself as a model for that person” (Kitcher, “Guyer and the Value of Freedom”, 99); While on this point Kitcher apparently agrees with Guyer, she does not appear to be moved by the potential problems Guyer raises for Kant’s strategy. Kant’s concern, she writes, “is not with how humans know of something that it has a mind, but with how they understand what it is to have a mind” (Kitcher, “A Kantian Argument”, 227). This is a valid point. But, Kant’s apparent lack of concern with ascribing practical agency and freedom to others may still indicate a problematic gap in his moral theory. This is a worry that Guyer highlights and attempts to allay.
6 I use ‘moral certainty’ here in the way Kant defines it in his Logic Lectures, e.g. when a cognition “is just as certain a ground for actions according to the rules of morality as if it were completely certain, then such a thing is moral certainty” (Blomberg, 24:200). He offers a parallel definition of practical, or moral, conviction in (Jäsche 9:72): “complete holding-to-be-true on subjective grounds, which in a practical relation hold just as much as objective grounds, is also conviction, though not logical but rather practical conviction (I am certain)”.
7 This conception is often tacitly at play when commentators point out that we become conscious of the moral law and freedom from the ‘practical, first-personal perspective’, where ‘first-personal’ follows ‘practical’ without skipping a beat.
8 See. e.g. (Rawls, Lectures, 183; 191–2). As Andrews Reath points out, on a common philosophical rendition of Kant’s principle of respect for persons, it is “the requirement to act from principles that can justify one’s actions to those affected by them (as rational agents with autonomy)” (Reath, “Formal Approaches”, 202). On this widely held interpretation, supported, for example, by Kant’s discussion of a deceitful promise (G 4:429–30), being able to justify one’s reasons to others and, hence, to give and respond to reasons, is a foundational feature of Kant’s moral theory. See e.g. (O’Neill, Constructions of Reason, 137–43).
9 Kant’s conception of a person as a legislative member of the kingdom of ends brings together two aspects of rational agency emphasized in the formulas of the Universal Law and of Humanity – a view of a person as a source of claims on the wills of others and as subject to the moral laws.
10 I draw here on Michael Thompson’s illuminating account of a relational concept of a person in “What is it to Wrong Someone?”. Thompson describes a person who sees herself as standing in relations of duty and right to others as de-relativizing of a prior relational concept X is a person in relation to Y (just as, e.g. X is a friend is a de-relativization of X is a friend of Y). On this view, ‘Recognizing someone as a person’ is registering her as a person in relation to yourself; it is the appropriation of such a proposition in the first person. Similarly, recognizing someone as a sister—saying ‘Hey, sister’, maybe—is registering her as your own sister. (Thompson, “What is it to Wrong Someone?” 353) See also (Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint).
11 For helpful discussion see (Engstrom, The Form of Practical Knowledge, 192ff).
12 Or, at least, have existed, since we would want to account for promises made to persons who had since died, etc.
13 Guyer also notes that “Kant never explicitly asks whether one can know that other human beings possess free wills or attempts to prove it”. (Guyer, “Proving Ourselves Free”, 158)
14 In the Inaugural Dissertation and his response to Eberhardt, Kant describes certain a priori representations, particularly space and time and the categories of the understanding, as originally acquired. See, e.g. (AA 8:222–3). The categories, in particular, are originally acquired because they would not function as rules of synthesis unless this synthesis was occasioned by empirical conditions (affection of sensibility). They are acquired originally, rather than empirically, because they are grounded a priori in the fundamental capacities of the mind and because their acquisition is a condition of all other objective representations. For helpful discussion, see e.g. Longuenesse, (Kant and the Capacity to Judge, 222, 243–4, 252–3).
15 For Kant, moral self-constraint necessarily underlies our recognition of being under obligation to others: “I can recognize that I am under obligation to others only insofar as I put myself under obligation” (MM 6:417). Nevertheless, awareness of being obligated to oneself, as such, is a more sophisticated achievement than awareness of being obligated to others, since, for one thing, intuitions regarding even the existence of self-regarding duties vary significantly among individuals and cultures, and, as Kant himself indicates in the Amphiboly, duties to self are often mistaken for duties to others.
16 In his remarks on moral education in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant stresses the importance of presenting a child with true examples of actions done from duty found in biographies and history books (CPrR 5:154). Such examples draw the child’s attention to the purity of the will and freedom manifested in the actions of another, and to his own capacity to act from pure moral principle, strengthening this capacity. Through a “lively presentation of the moral disposition in examples,” says Kant, “the pupil’s attention is fixed on the consciousness of his freedom” (CPrR 5:160), so that “The heart is freed … when in pure moral resolutions, examples of which are set before him, there is revealed to the human being an inner capacity not otherwise correctly known by himself, the inner freedom to release himself from the impetuous importunity of inclinations” (CPrR 5:161).
17 This suggests that Kant’s concept of freedom of the will – just as the concept of moral personhood, with which it is analytically connected – is a relational concept. So, when, in Groundwork III, Kant remarks that when we think of ourselves as free, “we transfer ourselves into the standpoint of a member of the world of understanding” (G 4:455), he is saying exactly this: that freedom is a relational concept. When I think of myself as free, I think of myself as a member of the community of free beings. It is also worth noting Kant’s repeated use of a structural analogy between freedom and universal gravity, both of which govern a system of relations. See (MM 6:449; Prol 358fn; Rel 6:139; Refl 3858, 17:315; OP 21:35, 51–2).
18 I follow Marcus Willaschek’s rendition of Kant’s conception of practical cognition as either an imperative, a ground for possible imperatives, or grounded in an imperative (Willaschek, “Freedom As a Postulate”, 109–14). Willaschek argues that we have practical cognition – cognition grounded in an imperative, rather than practical knowledge, of freedom. Others disagree. While I use Willaschek’s terminology here, my argument does not depend on taking a side in this debate.
19 Patricia Kitcher points out that as rational cognizers we are conscious of the grounds of our cognition (reasons for our judgements). We know these reasons not because we somehow observe ourselves thinking through introspection (rational cognizing is inaccessible to inner sense), but because we consciously engage in thinking and judging. This general point applies to practical deliberation: “deliberation is a species of thinking – and thinking can be understood only through engaging in it” (Kitcher, “A Kantian Argument”, 243).
20 I will say more on this point in section 4.2, where I address the claim that Kant’s strict epistemic limits on theoretical knowledge make the problem of recognition insoluble in his framework. See especially fn.25.
21 One may wonder how we know that we are co-deliberating or acting together with someone. What if I think that I can co-deliberate with rabbits, sparrows, or trees? And what if I think that I just cannot co-deliberate with certain kinds of people (e.g. those I take to be rednecks or savages) because they simply cannot listen to reason? The latter question touches on some deep issues concerning self-deception, which I briefly discuss in section 4.2 and whose full treatment would require a separate essay. For my purposes here, I focus on what Kant calls ‘common human understanding’. This excludes scenarios involving delusions, as in thinking that one can co-deliberate and act together with rabbits, sparrows, and trees. I also set aside cases of self-deceived mistaking of disagreement for the impossibility of interaction through reasons. These are particularly pernicious, especially because they typically involve an implicit recognition that the individuals one interacts with are indeed vernünftig beings, manifested in manipulative attempts to use their ability to respond to reasons to get them to do what the manipulator wants. My scope here is limited to practical interaction only between human beings, where, for the most part at least, ‘common human understanding’ has a pretty good practical grasp on what it means to understand, interact with each other, and act together, what contexts are morally relevant, and what considerations may be taken as putative moral-based reasons for action.
22 Guyer writes that, in the second Critique, “the method for establishing our subjection to the moral law is addressed to the individual: Kant argues that each one of us is inescapably conscious of his or her own subjection to the moral law, from which each of us can then infer his or her own freedom, but he does not offer an argument by means of which anyone of us can prove that all of us are subject to the moral law and hence that all of us are free.” (Guyer, “Proving Ourselves Free”, 157) Similarly, Saunders claims that Kant’s “exclusively first-personal approach” makes his account of freedom untenable because it “precludes any recognition of other rational agents” (Saunders, “Kant and the Problem of Recognition", 165;172).
23 Shifting away from the original position of seeing others as persons also requires a special kind of effort. Lucas Thorpe insightfully observes, for example, that it is often psychologically very difficult to do. He points to documentary evidence that Nazi perpetrators had to work hard in order not to hear the voices and demands of their victims (Thorpe, “Kant, Guyer, and Tomasello”, 125).
24 See, especially (Saunders, “Kant and the Problem of Recognition”).
25 This general response applies to Saunders’ argument (Saunders, “Kant and the Problem of Recognition”) that the epistemic limits of transcendental idealism preclude the recognition of other free rational agents because the latter is based on a third-personal, theoretical judgment. Appeals to the practical standpoint as a basis for recognition are of no help, he argues, because considering other beings from this standpoint itself presupposes a third-personal, theoretical judgment about the nature of these beings: “Everything in experience is determined entirely by natural necessity and predictable, which precludes [us] from discovering which parts of nature are free in the noumenal realm … We need to be able to judge [theoretically] which things are rational agents, and which are not; otherwise expressed, we need to be able to judge which things can adopt the practical standpoint in the first place. And when Kant claims that nature is entirely determined by natural necessity and predictable, he precludes this possibility” (Saunders, “Kant and the Problem of Recognition” 173, my bold); So, in order to consider how to act towards certain humans in a given situation, for example, we must first make and ordinarily do make an empirically based theoretical judgment that infers that these humans are free rational beings (intelligences, in Kant’s framework), who can, therefore, adopt the practical standpoint. On Saunders’ view, this common judgment cannot be accounted for within the transcendental idealist framework, making recognition of other free agents an insoluble problem for Kant. I think this judgment is indeed in conflict with Kant’s basic commitments, but for a very different reason – the same reason why Kant himself never suggests or implies that moral deliberation presupposes such a judgment and why he could not suggest or imply this. Theoretical judgment concerning “which things can adopt the practical standpoint in the first place” is a contradiction in terms. Kant’s distinction between persons and things is pertinent here. Things cannot adopt a practical standpoint. And theoretical reason, in its empirical judging about things, has nothing to say about persons, in the relevant, moral sense. It allows us to determine whether something is a human or a cabbage, but not whether that human can adopt a practical standpoint. The latter question is an exclusive prerogative of pure practical reason. Recalling Barbara Herman’s important idea, our effective understanding of the difference between persons and things belongs squarely to moral literacy. Relatedly, for Kant, no theoretical judgment about the rationality of others could help us with moral deliberation, at least not in the way Saunders envisions. For what matters for deliberation is the presence or absence of practical rationality and moral personhood of those whom our actions affect or concern. While Kant did not explicitly address the problem of recognition, as, perhaps, he should have, I argued that his basic commitments do support the claim that the relevant recognitional judgments we make are non-inferential and practical, insofar as they can be made only from the practical standpoint and draw on capacities that belong essentially to practical reason.
26 Moreover, as this kind of defaming is often done “so that one will be thought as good as, or at least not worse than others” (MM 6:466), moral defamation is a manifestation of the very egotistical self-esteem based on self-deception that morality requires us to extirpate.