Shruta Swarup

Kant notoriously privileges the motive of duty over other motives as uniquely capable of conferring moral worth upon our actions. When we look closely at the reasons he and his contemporary defenders offer for favouring the motive of duty, we find considerable confusion. When we take care to distinguish between the various criteria that are (sometimes only implicitly) invoked, we find that the case for the motive of duty's superiority falls apart. I show that with respect to one frequently invoked criterion, efficaciousness, the emotions fare no worse than the motive of duty—given their availability, it is within our power to will action from emotions no less than from the motive of duty. On examination, the Kantian case for the duty motive's superiority turns out to hinge on a different criterion: summonability. A motive satisfies this criterion only if it is within our power to summon the motive itself into our possession—to make it available to begin with. I offer the Kantian progressively more qualified interpretations of the claim that the duty motive is summonable and show that only the most enervated version of the claim survives, one on which the emotions and the motive of duty are on par.