Christel Johanna Fricke

According to Adam Smith, the acquisition of moral conscience is an essential part of a person’s moral education. I argue that moral conscience as conceived by Smith enables a person to intentionally take the role of an impartial spectator. I trace the process of moral education from the child in its family, to interaction with peers to learning and then to a self-evaluation, learning to become one’s own spectator and judge. This is a move from uncritical trust to external guidance to acquiring the faculty of conscience. Smith recommends most people to rely on the ‘common rules of morality’ rather than on sympathetic processes alone. But such reliance represents merely a second best procedure for reaching a properly impartial moral judgment. While the ‘wise and virtuous’ may well improve on the impartiality of the ‘common rules of morality’, even their moral judgments will never be perfectly impartial or certain beyond doubt.

This chapter presents a short biography of Immanuel Kant. It then reviews his particular thoughts on musical philosophy. Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Königsberg. He never married and died in his house on February 12, 1804. He placed the theory of cognition at the beginning of his critical transcendental philosophy, in Critique of Pure Reason. His theory of art was pointed toward identifying the place that the judgment of beautiful objects in nature and art occupies in his system of transcendental philosophy. Kant accorded to music the status of a fine art, whose works engage the cognitive powers in a state of free play. Critique of Judgment occupied a unique position in regard to the reception of Kantian transcendental philosophy. The basis for an understanding of the semiotic character of absolute music was provided by Kant's transcendental philosophy and his cognitivist aesthetics.

We are often pressed to forgive or in need of forgiveness: Wrongdoing is common. Even after a perpetrator has been taken to court and punished, forgiveness still has a role to play. How should a victim and a perpetrator relate to each other outside the courtroom, and how should others relate to them? Communicating about forgiveness is particularly urgent in cases of civil war and crimes against humanity inside a community where, if there were no forgiveness, the community would fall apart. Forgiveness is governed by social and, in particular, by moral norms. Do those who ask to be forgiven have to fulfil certain conditions for being granted forgiveness? And what does the granting of forgiveness consist in? We may feel like refusing to forgive those perpetrators who have committed the most horrendous crimes. But is such a refusal justified even if they repent their crimes? Could there be a duty for the victim to forgive? Can forgiveness be granted by a third party? Under which conditions may we forgive ourselves? The papers collected in the present volume address all these questions, exploring the practice of forgiveness and its normative constraints. Topics include the ancient Chinese and the Christian traditions of forgiveness, the impact of forgiveness on the moral dignity and self-respect of the victim, self-forgiveness, the narrative of forgiveness as well as the limits of forgiveness. Such limits may arise from the personal, historical, or political conditions of wrongdoing or from the emotional constraints of the victims.

Moral principles are universally valid, valid for all human beings in so far as they are mature, responsible and of a sound mind – this idea is an essential part of our understanding of morality. Moral principles do not allow for any exceptions. Therefore, we expect from every person we take for mature and responsible to do her or his moral duty. This does not mean that we are naive about the moral goodness of human beings. We just cannot give up this expectation without considering a person as immature and irresponsible, as not being provided with a sound mind so that we cannot blame her or him for any moral failure. Any analysis of moral motivation therefore has to explain both that all responsible persons can and must have a disposition to moral agency and that for all of them this disposition is somehow privileged so that, in a case of confl icting dispositions of volition and action, it is the moral dispositions that finally determine the aim or purpose of the action. On this background, the theories of moral motivation provided by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith are compared. Whereas Hume seems to give up the whole idea of universal validity of moral principles and moral obligation, both Kant and Smith try to explain how dispositions to moral agency can be as omnipresent and motivationally strong as they should be – given the implication of our moral expectations. However, both theories meet with essential difficulties because they cannot exclude the influence of contingent factors on the moral motivation of a responsible person.