Huizhong Sun

Kant’s moral philosophy is fundamentally deontological, yet it also exhibits a distinctive motivational structure. A central interpretive difficulty concerns whether moral motivation is confined to the a priori domain of consciousness or must be realized in empirical action. In some texts, Kant characterizes maxims as mere acts of willing and as possibilities, which appears to cast doubt on the actuality of action; accordingly, some interpreters, often along compatibilist lines, tend to exclude action from the scope of moral requirement. This paper argues that such readings rest on a misunderstanding. On the one hand, pure reason alone can serve as the source of the determining ground of maxims, while respect provides the incentive of action. On the other hand, the very concept of action requires a relation to experience, and moral action is no exception. While the former secures the purity of the law’s source, the latter raises a further question: how actions, as empirical events, can nevertheless be understood as determined by pure reason. Accordingly, pure reason is not merely practical by legislating for the will within consciousness; it must also account for how such determination is realized in the sensible world as actions appearing in experience. Kant’s moral philosophy, therefore, can be fully understood only from the perspective of a theory of action.

Persson and Savulescu argue that biomedical means of moral enhancement are necessary to address the civilizational risks arising from the growing imbalance between technological progress and ethical development. In response to this proposal, the bioconservative perspective remains an important point of reference for critical reflection. This paper argues that radical conceptions of moral enhancement involve internal tensions across four dimensions: necessity, normative justification, practical feasibility, and the relationship between freedom and equality. Such proposals presuppose a pessimistic assessment of human moral capacities, risk undermining moral agency, encounter difficulties of standardization, and, in practice, generate deep-seated tensions between freedom and equality. From the standpoint of addressing contemporary crises of development, uncritical optimism toward moral enhancement is therefore unwarranted. A restrained approach to technological intervention, together with a sustained commitment to human agency, remains indispensable.

The relationship between morality and Right has long been one of the central controversies in Kant scholarship, giving rise to two opposing positions: the independence thesis and the dependence thesis. This article argues for a moderate form of the dependence thesis while maintaining that the relationship between morality and Right cannot be understood in a uniform way. Right is necessarily grounded in morality in a certain respect. Because of the reciprocal relation between freedom and the moral law, Right cannot be conceived as entirely independent of morality. More specifically, juridical obligations derive their authority to coerce from the moral law grounded in the self-legislation of rational beings. At the same time, however, the principle of Right is concerned solely with the protection of external freedom. It determines only the legality of actions by requiring conformity to juridical obligations. Since it imposes no requirement concerning an agent's subjective maxims, a juridical law cannot at the same time be regarded as that agent's moral law. Furthermore, when viewed from the perspective of the incentives of action, the principle of Right, which permits external coercion, stands in contrast to the principle of virtue, whose incentive consists in internal self-constraint. Right and morality therefore share a common source, yet they are not identical.