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.

I defend the non-instrumentalist thesis that every adult member of a political society has a pro tanto fundamental moral right to an equal democratic say in determining the content of the laws to which she is subject. I begin by giving an account of an important kind of servility that has received only glancing notice in philosophical discussion. This servility consists in the willingness to subordinate one's capacity for moral judgement (as distinct from one's interests, desires, or will) to another's. I argue that, barring special circumstances, an adult person who willingly acquiesces to a lesser political liberty displays this type of servility. An adult cannot normally self-respectfully acquiesce to a less than equal democratic say. But, I argue, a condition for a political society to be just is that its members can self-respectfully acquiesce to the status it accords them. Thus, it is a pro tanto intrinsic requirement of justice that all adult members of a political society be granted an equal democratic say. There is a pro tanto fundamental moral right to an equal democratic say.