Carla Bagnoli

This paper compares Kant’s and Sidgwick’s arguments in defense of objective practical knowledge. While Kant focuses on practical truths in terms of practical laws governing the mind in action, Sidgwick is concerned with practical truths about action. This is a crucial difference in the understanding of practical knowledge, which is matched by a different understanding of moral phenomenology and of the significance of subjective experience in accounting for the authority of moral obligations. Key to these differences is a more fundamental divergence regarding reflection and its impact on agency. On the Kantian view, reflection is inherent to rational action, understood as the result of the activity of reason. On Sidgwick’s view, instead, reflection is direct reflection on the nature of the proposition in question, that is, first-order judgment. This difference affects the prospects of their respective arguments against ethical naturalism, the view that the normative phenomena relative to right and wrong can be explained away in terms of desires and other psychological mechanisms. Ultimately, the Kantian view allows for a more promising conception of ethical objectivity.

Spurred by Judith Butler’s seminal work, Pamela Anderson finds herself challenged to rethink her ontological assumptions, away from the traditional conceptions of the self. This essay is an attempt to face this challenge upfront, and come to terms with the kind of vulnerability that Anderson wants to vindicate. I start with distinguishing different contrastive but interlocking pairs of concepts of vulnerability: the ontological and the ethical, the pathogenic and the self-enhancing, the inherent and the circumstantial. I then argue for the relevance of ontological vulnerability and suggest that it reveals the apparent normative structure of human agency and indicates the root of mutual accountability. In this perspective, human vulnerability to love and love’s own vulnerability can be appreciated and reassessed as a distinctive drive to cooperative interactions and shared agency, which allows finite and interdependent agents to deal and cope with contingency and temporality, by relying on mutually accountable relations. Focusing on the dynamic reciprocal permeability which is distinctive of love, I concur with Anderson that emotional vulnerability is not the source of burdens and constraints but a precious capacity that enables relations of mutual accountability, shapes human identity, expands individual agency, and shapes integrity in interactive and historical ways.

The perspective of deliberative choice is constitutively from here. This simple truth carries significant implications for our agency and integrity, some of which are the focus of Wallace's thought-provoking essay. Wallace is concerned with the discrepancy between our present attachments and the rational justification of past decisions, which threatens our personal and moral integrity. In what follows, I raise some questions about Wallace's claim that attachments make us immune to regret and, ultimately, about his account of the impact of contingency in our practical thought. My argument revolves around two cases of immunity to regret, due to the agent's attachment to a ground project. Contrary to Wallace, I argue that in these cases the agent's inability to regret that things had not gone otherwise is neither unreasonable nor morally objectionable.

A recurrent objection is that Kant misconceives of morality because he does not engage with the perspective of the suffering and the vulnerable. In this essay, I look closely at this objection, starting from Kant’s distinction between two concepts of compassion, which respectively respond to the vulnerable and the suffering. This distinction calls into play the concept of respect; compassion’s relation to respect explains whether, and under which conditions, compassion is a moral attitude toward others. In sections 1 and 2, I show that the contention that Kant forced compassion out of the scope of moral philosophy is deeply rooted in a disagreement about the practical powers of reason. In sections 3 and 4, I compare Kant’s model of compassion with two others, respectively defended by Iris Murdoch and Theodor W. Adorno. Both these philosophers criticize Kant’s appeal to pure rational agency, but they point in different directions. Murdoch relates compassion to appreciation of concrete individuals, objecting that since Kant’s discussion of rational agency overlooks individuality, it cancels all differences between moral visions and outlooks. Instead, Adorno objects that Kant’s ethics overlooks the moral value of compassion because it is designed for purely rational agents—invulnerable to both misfortunes and emotions. I will argue that Murdoch’s critique misleads us by objecting to abstraction, while Adorno’s critique places compassion within the right perspective—that of the vulnerable. However, Adorno’s critique is also partly misplaced, because vulnerability is, in fact, a driving concern in Kant’s theory of practical reason. In section 5, I argue for the latter contention by introducing a distinction between constitutive and circumstantial vulnerability. This conceptual apparatus allows me to show that the criticisms presented in sections 1–4 misdiagnose Kant’s failure to account for compassion as a “moral emotion,” presenting it as a lack of attention to vulnerability and suffering. My contention in sections 6–7 is that, despite the powerful critiques against him, Kant provides a useful distinction between two kinds of compassion which explains how one should properly engage with the vulnerable and those who suffer. I deploy the distinction between proximal and distal compassion to capture the significance of another distinction, one which has been widely criticized (and is admittedly obsolete, but also little understood): the distinction between pathological and practical compassion, which takes center stage in Kant’s account of the duties of benevolence. Proximal compassion is felt in the presence of suffering, and mandates immediate action. By contrast, distal compassion is directed to suffering that is distant: it includes suffering that occurs in a distant future or past, or that is felt by persons unrelated to oneself by proximity and intimacy. While proximal compassion is not a virtue, and may undermine or even impede moral agency, distal compassion is a virtue that requires abstraction, imagination, and the exercise of rational capacities. In sections 8–9, I show that Kant’s complex account of compassion coheres with empirical psychology and succeeds in vindicating compassion’s different roles in practical reasoning. It thereby provides a convincing account of proper engagement with the vulnerability and suffering of others.

In this chapter, I offer a constructivist account of practical reasoning as both generative and transformative in response to calls from philosophers as diverse as Iris Murdoch and Gilbert Harman, who have urged the development of a more nuanced picture of reasoning that incorporates revisionary and revelatory changes in viewpoint. Within this context, I describe sensitivity to facts as a form of emotional engagement that is also partially constitutive of facts. I consider both the epistemological and ontological aspects of this claim. From an epistemological point of view, my claim is that agents strengthen their discernment of relevant facts through emotional engagement. From an ontological point of view, my claim is that, through emotional engagement, agents alter their immediate relationship to objects, changing not only “what matters” but also the “facts of the matter”. To an important extent, then, facts are inseparable from the subjective concerns of the agent. This is not to say that there are no subject-independent facts of the matter, nor that objects are mere projections of an agent’s sensibility onto the cold, colorless canvass of valueless reality. Rather, my claim is that the ontological boundary between facts and values—and the normative status of facts—are both internal to the practical perspective, defined by an agent’s particular concerns and within shared practices of mutual recognition. The most relevant implications of the constructivist view are found at the level of prospective rationality, that is, within the temporal dimension of rationality. Emotional engagement fosters changes in perspective, but this should not be read as simply arbitrary fluctuations. Despite being perspectival, such changes are applied to a subject-independent field, which gains further intelligibility through the agent’s altered relationship to those circumstances. By examining the dynamics of such changes, we acquire a more nuanced theoretical vocabulary to help make sense of the prospective dimension of practical reasoning within which ordinary agents are engaged.

According to the standard objection, Kantian constructivism implicitly commits to value realism or fails to warrant objective validity of normative propositions. This paper argues that this objection gains some force from the special case of moral obligations. The case largely rests on the assumption that the moral domain is an eminent domain of special objects. But for constructivism there is no moral domain of objects prior to and independently of reasoning. The argument attempts to make some progress in the debate by defending a robust conception of construction, which names a distinctive view of practical reasoning as transformative.