Gordon Graham

This paper draws on some lines of thought in Kant’s Critique of Judgment to construct an aesthetic counterpart to the moral argument for the existence of God that Kant formulates in the Critique of Practical Reason. The paper offers this aesthetic version as a theistic way of explaining how the natural world can be thought valuable independently of human desires and purposes. It further argues that such an argument must commend itself to anyone who is as deeply committed to the preservation of nature as to the promotion of justice.

This chapter begins with the unfavorable comparison that has often been made between the substantial progress the natural and social sciences have made, and the interminable and inconclusive debates that philosophers engage in. It examines the Humean attempt to make philosophy more scientific and the Lockean conception of philosophy as an “under-labourer for the sciences. It argues instead for a conception of philosophy as the pursuit of cognitive goals other than the kind of knowledge and explanation that are marks of the sciences.

This chapter argues that, contrary to a very widely held view, Reid’s express disagreement with Hume on the matter of morality cannot satisfactorily be pressed into the “realism _versus_ sentimentalism” dichotomy. Hume is certainly a sentimentalist, but there is good reason to interpret Reid’s use of the analogy between moral sense and sense perception in a way that does not imply the existence of “real” moral properties. Reid makes judgment central to the analogy, and this gives the exercise of an intellectual “power” primacy over passive sensual experience. The analogy thus allows him to apply the concepts “true” and “false” to moral judgments, without any quasi-realist appeal to moral facts.