Andrews Reath

Kant’s project in ethics is to defend the conception of morality that he takes to be embedded in ordinary thought. The principal aims of his foundational works in ethics – the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason – are to state the fundamental principle of morality, which he terms the “Categorical Imperative”, and then to give an account of its unconditional authority – why we should give moral requirements priority over non-moral reasons – by grounding it in the nature of free rational agency. Roughly the principle of morality gets its authority from the fact that it is by acting from this principle that we exercise our free agency. In these works Kant develops a distinctive account of the content of moral requirement (which is filled out in his later work, The Metaphysics of Morals). According to one version of the Categorical Imperative, we determine what sorts of actions are permissible or required in various situations by asking whether a principle of action is rationally willed as universal law for agents with autonomy. A second version of the Categorical Imperative derives the content of morality from the principle that we are to respect “humanity”, or “rational nature”, as an “end in itself” and never merely as a means. “Humanity” is the capacity for autonomous rational choice, and it includes the capacity to act from one’s own judgment of what one has reason to do, to set ends for oneself, and to guide one’s actions by values one finds it reasonable to accept. To hold that this capacity is an end in itself is to claim that it has an absolute value – a value that Kant terms “dignity” – that sets limits on the..

Paul Guyer’s Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness is a collection of essays written over a period of ten years on the roles of freedom, reason, law, and happiness in Kant’s practical philosophy. The centrality of these concepts has always been acknowledged, but Guyer proposes a different way to understand their interconnections. Kant extols respect for moral law and conformity to moral principle for its own sake while at the same time celebrating the value of human freedom and autonomy. Guyer sees tensions between these two poles of Kant’s practical philosophy—obedience to law and the value of freedom. He argues: “A profound paradox can be avoided only if it can be shown that Kant intended obedience to universal law to be mandatory solely as the necessary condition for the realization of human freedom and through that freedom a systematic and unselfish distribution of happiness among all persons” and that “the sheer fact of adherence to universal law is not an end in itself but is rather the means to the realization of the human potential for autonomy or freedom in both choice and action” (p. 1). One guiding theme of Guyer’s book is that Kant’s practical philosophy is based on the fundamental, and hence indemonstrable, intrinsic value of freedom, which Guyer understands as a value that is prior to the moral law, providing both an end to be realized through conformity to universal law and the basis of the authority of moral principles. Conformity to universal law has no intrinsic value in itself; it is the means to the preservation, enhancement, and full realization of human freedom, and is required because of its instrumental connection to the prior value of freedom. As he says, “freedom of choice and its natural expression in action are what human beings value most, and the fundamental principle of morality and the rules for both po-.

The essays in this volume offer an approach to the history of moral and political philosophy that takes its inspiration from John Rawls. All the contributors are philosophers who have studied with Rawls and they offer this collection in his honour. The distinctive feature of this approach is to address substantive normative questions in moral and political philosophy through an analysis of the texts and theories of major figures in the history of the subject: Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant and Marx. By reconstructing the core of these theories in a way that is informed by contemporary theoretical concerns, the contributors show how the history of the subject is a resource for understanding present and perennial problems in moral and political philosophy. This outstanding collection will be of particular interest to historians of moral and political philosophy, historians of ideas, and political scientists.