Kant on Moral Respect
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Anastasia Berg
Abstract
Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a mere effect or the motivating cause of action – but is instead identical to it. Drawing on Kant’s general account of feeling as the awareness of how representations and their objects harm or benefit our own powers, I argue that the identity between moral respect and the determination to action contains two elements. Moral respect is, first, a form of practical self-consciousness which constitutes the subject’s recognition of the moral law and thus of herself as intrinsically bound by it, i. e., as a moral agent. Second, respect is a capacity for receptive awareness of particular features of our environment as well as other persons insofar as they benefit and harm us as moral agents. Thereby moral respect affords us awareness in concreto of particular, morally-conditioned ends. In this way moral respect provides the key for a Kantian account of genuinely free practical receptivity.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
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- How Man Became the Measure: An Anthropological Defense of the Measure Doctrine in the Protagoras
- Aristotle on Attention
- The Gaze in the Mirror: Human Self and the Myth of Dionysus in Plotinus
- Themistius on Concept Formation
- Force, Motion, and Leibniz’s Argument from Successiveness
- Kant on Moral Respect
- Book Reviews
- Lammer, Andreas, The Elements of Avicenna’s Physics: Greek Sources and Arabic Innovation. Scientia Graeco-Arabica, vol. 20. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter 2018, xx + 594 pp.
- Anja Jauernig, The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press 2021, xii+380 pp.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- How Man Became the Measure: An Anthropological Defense of the Measure Doctrine in the Protagoras
- Aristotle on Attention
- The Gaze in the Mirror: Human Self and the Myth of Dionysus in Plotinus
- Themistius on Concept Formation
- Force, Motion, and Leibniz’s Argument from Successiveness
- Kant on Moral Respect
- Book Reviews
- Lammer, Andreas, The Elements of Avicenna’s Physics: Greek Sources and Arabic Innovation. Scientia Graeco-Arabica, vol. 20. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter 2018, xx + 594 pp.
- Anja Jauernig, The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press 2021, xii+380 pp.
