Principled and Unprincipled Maxims
Abstract: Kant frequently speaks as if all voluntary actions arise from our maxims as the subjective principles of our practical reason. But, as Michael Albrecht has pointed out, Kant also occasionally speaks as if it is only the rare person of “character” who acts according to principles or maxims. I argue that Kant’s seemingly contradictory claims on this front result from the fact that there are two fundamentally different ways that maxims of action can figure in the deliberation of the agent: an agent can act on a maxim either because it promises agreeable results or because he deems it to be an intrinsically correct principle of action. Kant describes a maxim of the latter sort as “firm” and as indicative of “character” in the honorific sense. If the agent’s commitment to his maxim is instead conditional on its agreeable results, we can say he does not act “on principle” and in that sense does not act on maxims at all: rather than aiming at a set of results because the action that produces them conforms to his maxim, he acts according to his maxim because doing so promises (and only as long as it promises) the results he desires. Such an agent thus lacks the principled maxims of a person of character since his maxims are always for sale to the highest bidder. Kant allows that an evil person can approximate the ideal of a principled indifference to results, but claims that only morally good action can be wholly principled. This is also why maxims of action in conformity with duty can be acquired gradually through habituation whereas an authentically moral maxim must instead arise from a “revolution” in thought.
© Walter de Gruyter 2012
Articles in the same Issue
- A Draft of Kant’s Reply to Hufeland: Key Questions of Kant’s Dietetics and the Problem of Its Systematic Place in His Philosophy
- Kant’s Regulative Spinozism
- Principled and Unprincipled Maxims
- Self-Determination and the Categories of Freedom in Kant’s Moral Philosophy
- Kant’s Ideality of Genius
- Le Kant de Foucault, une lecture téléologique de l’anthropologie
- Was ist der Mensch? – Das Gehirn-Geist-Problem aus kantischer Sicht Plädoyer für eine transzendentale Anthropologie
- „Kants Projekt des ewigen Friedens im Kontext der modernen Politik“
- Buchbesprechungen
- Zum Tod von Wladimir Brjuschinkin (Vladimir Bryushinkin)
- Zur Kantforschung in Usbekistan
Articles in the same Issue
- A Draft of Kant’s Reply to Hufeland: Key Questions of Kant’s Dietetics and the Problem of Its Systematic Place in His Philosophy
- Kant’s Regulative Spinozism
- Principled and Unprincipled Maxims
- Self-Determination and the Categories of Freedom in Kant’s Moral Philosophy
- Kant’s Ideality of Genius
- Le Kant de Foucault, une lecture téléologique de l’anthropologie
- Was ist der Mensch? – Das Gehirn-Geist-Problem aus kantischer Sicht Plädoyer für eine transzendentale Anthropologie
- „Kants Projekt des ewigen Friedens im Kontext der modernen Politik“
- Buchbesprechungen
- Zum Tod von Wladimir Brjuschinkin (Vladimir Bryushinkin)
- Zur Kantforschung in Usbekistan
