Pablo Muchnik

Since his pioneering Kant’s Impure Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2000), Robert Louden has helped us put a human face to the abstract a priori principles of Kant’s pure practical philosophy. Through a continuous spate of publications, some of which are gathered in his latest book Kant’s Human Being, Louden has managed to show the importance of the empirical dimension of Kantian ethics—a dimension which had been ignored or dismissed for more than two hundred years by scholars obsessed with “keeping philosophy pure.” This paper discusses the motivation behind Louden’s project and raises some doubts about his understanding of “moral anthropology,” arguing that it is perhaps too empirically-minded and hence fails to do justice to the complexity of Kant’s own thought.

In this paper, I develop a quasi-transcendental argument to justify Kant’s infamous claim “man is evil by nature.” The cornerstone of my reconstruction lies in drawing a systematic distinction between the seemingly identical concepts of “evil disposition” (böseGesinnung) and “propensity to evil” (Hang zumBösen). The former, I argue, Kant reserves to describe the fundamental moral outlook of a single individual; the latter, the moral orientation of the whole species. Moreover, the appellative “evil” ranges over two different types of moral failure: while an “evil disposition” is a failure to realize the good (i.e., to adopt the motive of duty as limiting condition for all one’s desires), an “evil propensity” is a failure to realize the highest good (i.e., to engage in the collective project of transforming the legal order into an ethical community). This correlation between units of moral analysis and types of obligation suggests a way to offer a deduction of the universal propensity on behalf of Kant. It consists in tracing the source of radical evil to the same subjective necessity that gives rise to the doctrine of the highest good. For, at the basis of Kant’s two doctrines lies the same natural dialectic between happiness and morality. While the highest good brings about the critically acceptable resolution of this dialectic, the propensity to evil perpetuates and aggravates it. Instead of connecting happiness and morality in an objective relation, the human will subordinatesmorality to the pursuit of happiness according to the subjective order of association. If this reading is correct, it would explain why prior attempts at a transcendental deduction have failed: interpreters have looked for the key to the deduction in the body of Kant’s text, where it is not to be found, for it is tucked, instead, in the Preface to the first edition.

The aim of Kant’s Sources in Translation is to retrieve the rich intellectual world that influenced Kant’s philosophical development. In its first stage, the series makes available the most important textbooks Kant used throughout his long teaching career. Many of these textbooks are in Latin or in German and remain inaccessible to Anglophone readers. Lacking this material, however, it is difficult to appreciate Kant’s originality and process of philosophical maturation, for readers are unable to understand what prompted Kant to introduce a distinction, offer a qualification, attack a position, or develop a new thesis. This background is essential to understand the genesis of Kant’s thought. This volume provides the first English translation of Johann August Eberhard’s Preparation for Natural Theology, as well as the Danzig transcript of Kant’s course on rational theology. Given the growing contemporary interest in Kant’s philosophy of religion and the heated debates on how to read his bewildering Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, the material published here is key to shedding light on the formative stages of Kant’s mature thoughts on these matters.