Mark Timmons

Ethics and Practical Reason, edited by Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut, contains thirteen essays, most of which were presented at a conference at the University of St. Andrews, March 23–6, 1995. The essays are preceded by the editors’ introduction in which they nicely set up the collection by explaining the dialectic among competing Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian accounts of the nature of practical reasoning, particularly in relation to ethical reasoning. What follows is but a glimpse of the various essays, each of which I found to be of outstanding philosophical merit.

Moral judgments are typically experienced as being categorically authoritative – i.e. as having a prescriptive force that is motivationally gripping independently of both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires, and justificationally trumps both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires. We argue that this key feature is best accommodated by the meta-ethical position we call ‘cognitivist expressivism’, which construes moral judgments as sui generis psychological states whose distinctive phenomenological character includes categorical authoritativeness. Traditional versions of expressivism cannot easily accommodate the justificationally trumping aspect of categorical authoritativeness, because they construe moral judgments as fundamentally desire-like. Moral realism cannot easily accommodate the aspect of inherent motivational grip, because realism construes moral judgments as a species of factual belief.

For Kant, moral evil of all sorts - evil that is rooted in a person's character - is manifested in action which, on the one hand, is explicable in terms of an agent's own reasons for action and so imputable, though on the other hand it is, in some sense, irrational. Because such evil is rooted in a person's character, it "corrupts the ground of all maxims" and thus deserves to be called radical evil. Moreover, according to Kant, not only are human beings susceptible to such evil, being evil is an inescapable condition of being human. These claims raise a number of questions, among them the following: How can we ecxplain the possibility of irrational, yet explicable, freely done actions given Kant's views about human agency? What is the nature of radical evil? In what sense is it a corrupting ground of all maxims? What reason does Kant have for claiming that radical evil is an inescapable part of the human condition? In this paper, I focus on these questions. Sections I and II are concerned with some basic themes and distinctions pertaining to Kant's theory of action and practical rationality that will provide a basis for understanding his view of moral evil. In section III, I turn to Kant's analysis of moral evil in its varios manifestations in order to provide, in section IV, a general charcterization of moral evil. In section V, I consider Kant's claim that radical evils corrupts the ground of all maxims, and what this claim implies about the possibility of actions having moral worth. In section VI, I want to consider what we can call Kant's Universality Thesis, viz., his claim that necessarily all human beings are radically evil. In his recent book, Kant's Theory of Freedom, Henry Allison has argued that the UT represents a synthetic a priori claim, and he proceeds to provide a 'deduction' for it, something that Kant failed to do. I argue that Allison's deduction does not work, though I am afraid I don't have a deduction of my own to propose on Kant's behalf, nor do I see how to reconcile Kant's own defense of the UT with its alleged a priori status. Kant's UT remains problematic. Für Kant manifestiert sich das moralisch Böse in allen seinen Varianten - das Böse nämlich, das im Charakter einer Person wurzelt - in Handlungen, die auf der einen Seite vom eigenen Standpunkt des Handelnden her expliziert werden können und die deshalb zurechenbar sind, die aber auf der anderen Seite in einer gewissen Hinsicht als irrational bezeichnet werden müssen. Weil das Böse im Charakter der Person wurzelt, "verdirbt es den Grund aller Maximen" und verdient deshalb "das radikal Böse" genannt zu werden. Darüber hinaus sind menschliche Wesen nach Kant nicht nur für das Böse anfällig, es ist vielmehr unentrinnbar menschliches Schicksal, böse zu sein. Diese Thesen werfen eine Reihe von Fragen auf, unter ihnen die folgenden: Wie läßt sich, Kants Auffassungen über die Natur menschlichen Handelns vorausgesetzt, die Möglichkeit irrationalen, aber gleichwohl vom Standpunkt des Handelnden her explizierbaren und also freien Handelns erklären? Was ist das Wesen des radikal Bösen? In welchem Sinne verdirbt es den Grund aller Maximen? Warum behauptet Kant, das radikal Böse sei unentrinnbares Schicksal des Menschen? Der Beitrag ist diesen Fragen gewidmet. Er befaßt sich zuerst mit einigen Grundfragen und Grundunterscheidungen von Kants Handlungstheorie und seiner Theorie der praktischen Vernunft. Das erlaubt uns, Kants Auffassungen über das moralisch Böse zu verstehen. Abschnitt III wendet sich Kants Analyse des moralisch Bösen in seinen verschiedenen Ausprägungen zu, um auf dieser Grundlage eine allgemeine Charakterisierung des moralisch Bösen geben zu können. Abschnitt V befaßt sich mit Kants Behauptung, das radikal Böse verderbe den Grund aller Maximen, und mit ihren Implikationen für die Frage nach dem moralischen Wert von Handlungen überhaupt. In Abschnitt VI geht es um das, was man "Kants Universalitätsthese" nennen kann, d.i. seine Behauptung, menschliche Wesen seien notwendigerweise radikal böse. In seinem jüngst erschienenen Werk über Kant's Theory of Freedom vertritt Henry Allison die Meinung, UT enthalte einen synthetischen Satz a priori, und er legt eine "Ableitung" von UT vor, was Kant nicht getan hat. Ich versuche zu zeigen, daß Allisons Ableitung nicht schlüssig ist, obwohl ich - leider - keine eigene Deduktion anbieten kann, die Kants These stützt, noch einen Weg sehe, Kants eigene Verteidigung von UT mit ihrem angeblich apriorischen Status in Übereinstimmung zu bringen. Kants UT bleibt problematisch.

In the past 25 years or so, the issue of ethical universalizability has figured prominently in theoretical as well as practical ethics. The term, 'universaliz ability' used in connection with ethical considerations, was apparently first introduced in the mid-1950s by R. M. Hare to refer to what he characterized as a logical thesis about certain sorts of evaluative sentences (Hare, 1955). The term has since been used to cover a broad variety of ethical considerations including those associated with the ideas of impartiality, consistency, justice, equality, and reversibility as well as those raised in the familar questions: 'What if everyone did that?' and 'How would you like it if someone did that to you? But this recent effloresence of the use of the term 'universalizability' is something that has deep historical roots, and has been central in various forms to the thinking about morality of some of the greatest and most influential philosophers in the western tradition. While the term is relatively new, the ideas it is now used to express have a long history. Most of these ideas and questions have been or can be formulated into a principle to be discussed, criticized, or defended. As we discuss these ideas below this prin ciple will be stated on a separate numbered line. The concepts of justice and equality were closely linked in Greek thought. These connections between these two concepts are apparent even in two authors who were hostile to the connection, Plato and Aristotle.

CONDUCT AND CHARACTER is a concise anthology of readings in ethical theory that covers the major schools of thought as well as a handful of fundamental topics in ethical theory. Reading selections in the chapters provide coverage of both classical and contemporary philosophical writings, representing a spectrum of viewpoints on each theory or topic. The readings include brief introductions to assist students in identifying key ideas and have been selected and edited in order to optimize student comprehension. This collection is perfect for ethics courses that focus on theory, as well as a supplementary text for applied ethics courses. Because of short, self-contained chapters it also works very well for an ethics component in introductory philosophy courses

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant claims that hypothetical imperatives are analytic and that categorical imperatives are synthetic. This claim plays a crucial role in Kant’s attempt to establish moral ‘oughts’ as categorically binding on all rational agents, for by classifying moral statements according to this distinction, Kant hopes to uncover the sort of justification required to establish such statements. However, Kant’s application of the analytic/ synthetic distinction to imperatives is problematic. For one thing, this distinction was developed by Kant in connection with indicative, subject-predicate statements, which would seem to cast doubt on the idea that imperatives can be either analytic or synthetic. Moreover, Kant’s claim that hypothetical imperatives are analytic and categorical imperatives are synthetic seems to conflict with other claims in his moral works. For example, in the Groundwork, Kant claims that hypothetical imperatives are unproblematic since they can be established on the basis of experience. But this is incompatible with the idea that hypothetical imperatives are analytic, since presumably all analytic statements are a priori — established independently of experience.

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is sometimes called the relevance problem. In this paper we describe the frame problem and certain of its apparent morals concerning human cognition, and we argue that these morals have significant import regarding both the nature of moral normativity and the human capacity for mastering moral normativity. The morals of the frame problem bode well, we argue, for the claim that moral normativity is not fully systematizable by exceptionless general principles, and for the correlative claim that such systematizability is not required in order for humans to master moral normativity.

In Ideal Code, Real World, Brad Hooker attempts to breathe new life into rule-consequentialism, a view which, particularly in its utilitarian guise, was intensively explored in the 1950s and 1960s. But as Hooker points out, as the problems with the view compounded, it became generally thought of as a ‘tried and untrue’ approach to moral theory. It is commonly believed for instance that any coherent version of R-C, when fully fleshed out, will be extensionally equivalent to its act-consequentialist cousin, thus not a distinctive view. Again, views featuring ideal codes are often criticized for being in some sense too ideal because, for example, they involve unrealistic assumptions about human cognition and motivation. Hooker’s book, based partly on some of his published articles, carefully develops a non-utilitarian version of R-C that responds to these and other objections thus making it a serious contender among normative moral theories now on offer.