Thomas Hill

From Plato to Rawls political philosophers have tried to expose our institutional defects, guide reform, and inspire hope by describing a more perfect social world that they believe possible. To pessimists, cynics, and many clear-sighted realists the futility and dangers of focusing o utopias seems so evident that “utopian thinking” is now a dismissive pejorative term. Marxists, for example, managed to use it to disparage their opponents despite their own goal of a classless society and the withering away of the state. What counts as utopian and what value it has, however, depend on many factors – the aims of the author, the audience addressed, the ways in which the projected ideals differ from things as they are, their likely use and abuse by others, and so on. My discussion will be focused on a topic close to home for me – Kantian moral philosophy. In many ways this presents an ideal world in contrast to the actual world, urging us to act by the ideal even when our feet are mired in the real. So I want to explore whether Kantian moral theory inevitably engages us in utopian thinking of an objectionable sort. There are, of course, many aspects of that theory and many different interpretations. Although I comment briefly on other matters to provide context, I am most concerned to consider the problem of utopian thinking with respect to my reconstruction of Kant’s idea of moral legislation in a commonwealth (“kingdom”) of ends (1785) and how it plays out in his later work (1797-8). This requires me to re-visit, modify, and supplement thoughts I expressed on this topic long ago, when much younger and bolder.

Rüdiger Bittner surveys with a skeptical eye classic and contemporary ideas of Kantian autonomy. He allows that we can be more or less free in a modest (quasi-Hobbesian) sense and that many people may want more of this freedom from impediments that make it difficult or impossible to do various things. He argues, however, that high-minded general affirmations of human freedom are unfounded and not likely to retain their grip on our thinking. While acknowledging the value of Bittner’s challenges, I raise questions about Bittner’s dismissal of ideas of freedom apparently imbedded in ordinary language and his critique of the idea of autonomy in Kant’s ethics and broadly Kantian theories. A key issue is how to make sense of the claim that a moral law can be a law and yet also self-imposed. Given certain background assumptions about Kant’s conception of autonomy of the will, the key claim requires different interpretations when it concerns the supreme moral law (the Categorical Imperative) and when it concerns more specific moral laws (for example, derivative principles in Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue). Bittner’s challenges are valuable because they require us to work out and articulate more carefully what we mean by autonomy and why it is important. As Bittner says, Kant’s idea of autonomy is not the same as the ideas of autonomy that appear in medicine, politics, and everyday life. Nevertheless, those who care about either have some reason to think about how these are connected.