Jeanine Grenberg

Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, the so-called Formula of Humanity, appeals to the humanity in our persons as an unconditional end-in-itself that may never be used merely as a means. Various interpretive challenges have led to scholarly disagreement concerning what Kant meant by the term ‘humanity’ in this formulation. Four views emerge from the literature: (1) humanity is an abstract idea, (2) humanity is the capacity for end-setting generally, (3) humanity is the capacity for morality, and (4) humanity is a good will. After surveying each of these views, this chapter argues for a teleological reading of ‘humanity’ in one’s person. A focus on Kant’s first Critique discussion of ideas and ideals reveals that the ‘idea of humanity’ and ‘ideal of humanity’ both determine which capacities define an actually existing human being and provide the regulative ideal or telos articulating the vocation of that human being’s existence. This ‘idea’ and ‘ideal’ of humanity reveal that the capacity for morality, broadly conceived as autonomous self-legislation of categorical moral demands extending both to the choice of maxims and the setting of obligatory ends, a capacity which undergirds and makes possible one’s non-moral capacities for end-setting and prudential choice, is definitional of humanity. This capacity simultaneously identifies human beings as the kind of being they are, and allows those beings to become worthy of that humanity through moral development.

In this book, Professor Jeanine Grenberg defends the idea that Kant's virtue theory is best understood as a system of eudaemonism, indeed, as a distinctive form of eudaemonism that makes it preferable to other forms of it: a system of what she calls Deontological Eudaemonism. In Deontological Eudaemonism, one achieves happiness both rationally conceived and empirically conceived only via authentic commitment to and fulfilment of what is demanded of all rational beings: making persons as such one's end in all things. To tell this story of Deontological Eudaemonism, Grenberg first defends the notion that Kant's deontological approach to ethics is simultaneously teleological. She then shows that the realization of an aptitude for the virtuous fulfilment of one's obligatory ends provides the solid basis for simultaneous realization of happiness, both rationally and empirically conceived. Along the way, she argues both that Kant's notion of happiness rationally conceived is essentially identical to Aristotle's conception of happiness as unimpeded activity, and that his notion of happiness empirically conceived is best realized via an unwavering commitment to the fulfilment of one's obligatory ends.

In this paper, I take Philip Rossi’s robust interpretation of critique as an interpretive guide for thinking generally about how to interpret Kant’s texts. I reflect first upon what might appear to be a minor technical issue: how best to translate the term Fähigheit when Kant utilizes it in reference to the human experience of pleasure and displeasure. Reflection upon this technical issue will, however, end up being a case study in how important it is when we are interpreting Kant’s texts to have Rossi’s focus on human finitude in the background. The terrain for these reflections on human finitude will be the realm of feelings of pleasure and displeasure. And the result will be that, counter to recent interpreters, like Elizondo, who have suggested that Kant could welcome a thoroughly active conception of rational feeling, we must instead, as guided by Kant’s commitment to human finitude, remember that every feeling for Kant—even the most rational of feelings, like the moral feeling of respect, or the pleasure he notes that we take in the proper functioning of one’s virtuous rational self—must be understood within the purview and constraints of the finite and sensibly-affected human being. I hope, then, that this brief reflection can be taken as one small piece of that larger story Rossi so aptly describes in his book, the story which answers the question of “What is critique?” in a way that insists upon but also simultaneously celebrates the centrality of finitude in human existence.

In this paper, I respond to questions Sticker and Saunders raise about integrating third-personal interactions within my phenomenological first-personal account of moral obligatedness. Sticker argues that third-personal interactions are more central for grounding moral obligatedness than I admit. Saunders turns things around and suggests we might not even be able to access third-personal interactions with others at the level one would need to in order to secure proper moral interactions with them. I argue in response that both these challenges misunderstand something about my phenomenological first-personal account of the grounding of moral obligation. Sticker assumes that I make absolutely no room for third-personal interactions as important for morality, but that is not the case. And Saunders assumes that first-, second- and third-personal interactions demand phenomenological access to oneself and others as transcendentally free, but I deny that claim. I will consider each of these challenges in turn.

In this paper, I reject Frierson’s interpretation of Kantian reductionist phenomenology. I diagnose his failure to articulate a more robust notion of phenomenology in Kant as traceable to a misguided effort to protect pure reason from the undue influence of sensibility. But in fact Kant himself relies regularly on a phenomenological and felt first personal perspective in his practical philosophy. Once we think more broadly about what Frierson calls “the space of reasons,” we must admit a robust role for attentive reflection upon felt, phenomenological experience at the center of Kantian practical deliberation.

Kant’s commitment to autonomy raises difficult questions about the very possibility of Kantian moral education, since appeal to external pedagogical guidance threatens to be in contradiction with autonomous virtue. Furthermore, moral education seems to involve getting good at something through repetition; but Kant seems to eschew the notion of repeated natural activity as antithetical to autonomy. Things become even trickier once we remember that Kant also views autonomous human beings as radically evil: we are capable of choosing rationally and autonomously, but, left to our own devices, that same capacity for reason might tempt us to choose only out of a concern to satisfy our happiness. We thus need a moral education which realizes autonomy while dodging the dual bullets of external natural forces and internal evil forces. Ultimately, his concerns about external natural forces and internal evil forces do not lead Kant to reject either moral education or a role for repeated activity in it. Rathe...

Bernard Williams has recently taken Kant to task for his apparent inability to account for the moral import of emotions. Rigid adherence to Kant's austere "motive of duty," says Williams, undermines any possibility of integrity of character, since it demands that an agent's moral life be alienated from her emotional life. ;Providing an adequate response to Williams' critiques on these issues will require a revision of our understanding of Kant's conceptions of action and of freedom. The "Incorporation Thesis", introduced by Andrews Reath and expanded by Henry Allison, asserts that no incentive, including those sensibly-expressed incentives we call "inclinations," can determine choice except by being incorporated into a maxim of action. To support and complete this theory of action, Allison goes on to introduce an incompatibilist conception of freedom. Although Allison's account saves Kant from a crude "vector forces" account of action, it also seems to grant Williams' point that, for Kant, it is only rational principles and not emotions that are crucial for moral action. ;I begin my dissertation by providing an alternative interpretation of Kantian motivation and choice which, while saving the advantages of the Incorporation Thesis, grants also that all action is motivated by one's strongest desire. In Chapter Two, I discuss and reject received opinions about Kant which would suggest that this account of motivation necessarily undermines his project of a metaphysics of morals. In Chapter Three, I provide my positive account of specifically moral motivation, clarifying the meaning of the practicality of pure reason, given that it is the strength of one's moral desires that motivates moral action. In Chapter Four, I provide a compatibilist account of freedom and autonomy. Finally, in a Postscript, I argue that these accounts of action and freedom allow for a wide range of feelings to be granted legitimate motivating influence in moral action. Furthermore, properly conceived, integrity of character need not be compromised

I argue that there can be, on Kant's account, a significant motivational role for feeling in moral action. I first discuss and reject Andrews Reath's claim that Kant is forced to disallow a motivational role for feeling because of his rejection of moral sense theory. I then consider and reject the more general challenge that allowing a role for the influence of feeling on the faculty of desire undermines Kant's commitment to a morality free from anthropological considerations. I conclude by providing an overview of Kant's discussion of the moral feeling of respect which shows this feeling to meet the criteria he sets for inclusion in moral motivation.

In previous years, philosophers have either ignored the virtue of humility or found it to be in need of radical redefinition. But humility is a central human virtue, and it is the purpose of this book to defend that claim from a Kantian point of view. Jeanine Grenberg argues that we can indeed speak of Aristotelian-style, but still deeply Kantian, virtuous character traits. She proposes moving from focus on action to focus on person, not leaving the former behind, but instead taking it up within a larger, more satisfying Kantian moral theory. Using examples from literature as well as philosophy, she shows that there is a Kantian virtue theory to be explored in which humility plays a central role. Her book will have a wide appeal to readers not only in Kant studies but also in theological ethics and moral psychology.

Jeanine Grenberg - Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 335-336 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Jeanine M. Grenberg St. Olaf College Bernard Freydberg. Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 180. Paper, $19.95. At the heart of the task of the historian of philosophy is the effort to interpret well what has been said by another philosopher. Like the poet who chooses to create verse under the constraints of meter and rhyme, the historian does philosophy under the constraints of the historical text. Given these constraints, any historian of philosophy—continental or analytic—must bind herself to the text. The significant distinction one..

We are told in the introduction to this volume that what holds together such an apparently diverse collection of essays under a single rubric is the theme of "human nature." And this is fair enough: themes ranging from Kant's reflections on physiology, to his investigation of the vexed notion of what it is that constitutes a race, to his reflections on philosophy of history, to his lectures on pedagogy all fit reasonably enough under the rubric of "human nature." All point us, that is, toward a clearer understanding of how Kant would have answered the question, "What is a human being?" Yet this straight-laced, somewhat mundane description of this volume's contents belies the quirky, unexpected, and downright strange reflections that can be found therein. Perhaps those familiar with Kant's famous dinner parties would have expected him to say that "[b]odily motions prescribed by a doctor who is not a philosopher weaken the invalid's body, unless they are seasoned with some social amusement and affect the body favorably". But who would have expected Kant to recommend that "[i]n.

Henry Allison's “Incorporation Thesis” has played an important role in recent discussions of Kantian ethics. By focussing on Kant's claim that “a drive [Triebfeder] can determine the will to an action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim,” Allison has successfully argued against Kant's critics that desire-based non-moral action can be free action. His work has thus opened the door for a wide range of discussions which integrate feeling into moral action more deeply than had previously been considered “Kantian”

Henry Allison and Paul Guyer have recently offered interpretations of Kant's argument in Groundwork III. These interpretations share this premise: the argument moves from a non-moral, theoretical premise to a moral conclusion, and the failure of the argument is a failure to make this jump from the non-moral to the moral. This characterization both of the nature of the argument and its failure is flawed. Consider instead the possibility that in Groundwork III, Kant is struggling toward something rather different from this, not trying to pull the moral rabbit out of the theoretical hat, but instead seeking a proto-phenomenological grounding of morality: a grounding that begins from first personal felt experiences that already possess moral content, and proceeds to its further practical claims via attentive reflection on these felt experiences. This paper brings this assumption to our reading of Groundwork III, showing that in doing so we acquire a deeper appreciation both of the argument, and the reasons it fails. Kant's argument is practical throughout. And the failure of the argument is the failure of Kant's nascent efforts to provide a new, phenomenological method for the grounding of practical philosophy.

In this essay, I look at some claims Anne Margaret Baxley makes, in her recent book Kant's Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy, about the relationship between reason and sensibility in Kant's theory of virtue. I then reflect on tensions I find in these claims as compared to the overall goal of her book: an account of Kant's conception of virtue as autocracy. Ultimately, I argue that interpreters like Baxley who want to welcome a more robust role for feeling in Kantian ethics must, in order to achieve our purposes, move beyond the general account of the limits for the role of the moral feeling of respect in the grounding of Kant's ethics which Henry Allison established in his influential Kant's Theory of Freedom