Logan Carey Ginther

In this paper, I use the story of Fantine’s self-sacrifice for her daughter Cosette to reflect on the strictness of Kantian duties of self-respect and, more generally, his views on moral conflicts and theirresolution. Fantine’s story contains remarkable parallels to Kant’s discussion of duties of self-respect: Kant posits perfect duties not to do precisely the things Fantine does. I argue that Fantine’s duty to care for her daughter is probably only an imperfect one, and thus that it would not justifiably override her perfect duties of self-respect. But I point out that Kant expects virtuous agents to think of imperfect duties as more perfect than they are, and I argue that, if this is what is going on in Fantine’s case, it is understandable that she acted how she did, and we need not condemn her self-sacrifice.

In the famous “Incentives” chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant includes a discussion of the Biblical injunction to “[l]ove God above all, and your neighbor as yourself” (KpV 5:83). Kant reads this not as a commandment to feel love and then to do good out of this, but rather as a commandment to strive toward eventually doing our duty gladly. But Kant explicitly warns against flattering ourselves to think that our moral disposition has ever developed into such an “ideal of holiness” that love replaces respect for the moral law: focusing on the gladly part of doing our duty gladly risks sidelining the duty part, the fact that moral laws impose obligations on us whether we like it or not.

In this paper, I consider Kant’s attitude toward the development of the moral motive from one of respect into one of love. In the second Critique, Kant discourages the thought of doing our duty gladly out of love, because this obscures the important idea that the moral law applies to us whether we like it or not. But in the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant thinks that a developed disposition of love is important for explaining how we are moved by concepts of duty. I link these different treatments to the different moral psychological stories Kant has to tell in the second Critique and the Doctrine of Virtue: the fundamental motive of respect for the moral law explains how we can decide between the nonmoral and the moral in general, but we need more specific motives to explain decisions between different moral courses of action in the realm of imperfect duty.

When discussing well-being, subject-relative concerns are intuitively important ones. In this article, I argue that Immanuel Kant's theory of well-being can be satisfactorily subject-relative, despite his emphasis on objective moral well-being. Because the specifics of agents’ situations affect agents’ moral endowments, duties regarding moral well-being can be altered for subject-relative reasons. When it comes to thinking about the well-being of others, the important Kantian notion of respect for rational agents ensures that this will be decidedly subject-relative, too, and, what is more, that this will be aimed specifically at natural well-being (happiness).