A Funeral March for Those Drowning in Shallow Ponds?
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Martin Sticker
Abstract
I discuss the problem that Kant’s ethics seems to be incapable of capturing our strong intuition that emergencies create a context for actions that is very different from other cases of helping and from other opportunities to further obligatory ends. I argue that if we pay attention to how Kant grounds beneficence we see that distress and emergency function as constitutive concerns. They are vital to establishing the duty of beneficence in the first place, and they also guide the application of duties to specific cases. Kant’s conception of imperfect duties to others, when understood correctly, offers a way to understand why emergencies are morally important, but also why other factors have a place in our moral reasoning.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Jens Timmermann, Kate Moran, Oliver Sensen, Alice Pinheiro Walla, Michael Walschots, Stefano Lo Re, Corinna Mieth, Nora Kassan, Ido Geiger, Irina Schumski, James Camien McGuiggan and two anonymous Kant-Studien referees for feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I presented earlier versions of this paper at the University of St Andrews and at a workshop jointly organized by the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, as well as at conferences of the Israeli Philosophical Association at Ben-Gurion University and of the Association for Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. My research was financially supported by a two-year Irish Research Council grant on Kant and overdemandingness. I am grateful to Jens Timmermann, Kate Moran, Marcel van Ackeren, Alice Pinheiro Walla, Joe Saunders, Brian McElwee, Paul Formosa, Corinna Mieth, James Camien McGuiggan and Lucas Thorpe for many fruitful discussions of overdemandingness and Kantian ethics, and to the departments of philosophy of the Universities of Göttingen, Trinity College Dublin and Bristol for facilitating my research on this topic.
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Kant translations follow the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, edited by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Abhandlungen
- Ein weiteres Reinschriftfragment von Kants Entwurf Zum ewigen Frieden
- An Antinomy Between Regulative Principles: An Aporetic Resolution to the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment
- A Funeral March for Those Drowning in Shallow Ponds?
- Die Aufrichtigkeit als die Wurzel der Moralität. Kant (und Nietzsche)
- Radical Immanence of Thought and the Genesis of Consciousness: Salomon Maïmon
- Buchbesprechungen
- Lucy Allais: Manifest reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 329 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-874713-0.
- Robert Lanier Anderson: The Poverty of Conceptual Truth. Kant’s Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. XVIII u. 408 Seiten. ISBN: 978-0-19872457-5.
- Béatrice Longuenesse: I, Me, Mine. Back to Kant, and Back Again. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. XVIII, 257 Seiten. ISBN 978-0-19-966576-1.
- Robert Hanna: Cognition, Content, and the A Priori. A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 464 Seiten. ISBN 978-0-19871629-7.
- Martin Bunte: Erkenntnis und Funktion. Zur Vollständigkeit der Urteilstafel und Einheit des Kantischen Systems. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016. [Kantstudien-Ergänzungshefte Band 189]. 399 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-11-048802-9.
- Diccionario de la filosofía crítica kantiana. Ed.: Mario Caimi, Ileana Beade, José González Ríos, Macarena Marey, Fernando Moledo, Mariela Paolucci, Hernán Pringe, Marcos Thisted: Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2017. 512 Seiten. ISBN 978-950-563-450-7.
- Gualtiero Lorini: Fonti e lessico dell’ontologia kantiana. I Corsi di Metafisica (1762-1795). Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2017. 270 p. ISBN 9788846747389.
- Sascha Salatowsky: Die Philosophie der Sozinianer. Transformationen zwischen Renaissance-Aristotelismus und Frühaufklärung. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2015. 519 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-7728-2675-7.
- Jeffrey Edwards: Autonomy, Moral Worth, and Right. Kant on Obligatory Ends, Respect for Law, and Original Acquisition. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018. 353 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-11-051606-7.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Abhandlungen
- Ein weiteres Reinschriftfragment von Kants Entwurf Zum ewigen Frieden
- An Antinomy Between Regulative Principles: An Aporetic Resolution to the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment
- A Funeral March for Those Drowning in Shallow Ponds?
- Die Aufrichtigkeit als die Wurzel der Moralität. Kant (und Nietzsche)
- Radical Immanence of Thought and the Genesis of Consciousness: Salomon Maïmon
- Buchbesprechungen
- Lucy Allais: Manifest reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 329 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-874713-0.
- Robert Lanier Anderson: The Poverty of Conceptual Truth. Kant’s Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. XVIII u. 408 Seiten. ISBN: 978-0-19872457-5.
- Béatrice Longuenesse: I, Me, Mine. Back to Kant, and Back Again. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. XVIII, 257 Seiten. ISBN 978-0-19-966576-1.
- Robert Hanna: Cognition, Content, and the A Priori. A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 464 Seiten. ISBN 978-0-19871629-7.
- Martin Bunte: Erkenntnis und Funktion. Zur Vollständigkeit der Urteilstafel und Einheit des Kantischen Systems. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016. [Kantstudien-Ergänzungshefte Band 189]. 399 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-11-048802-9.
- Diccionario de la filosofía crítica kantiana. Ed.: Mario Caimi, Ileana Beade, José González Ríos, Macarena Marey, Fernando Moledo, Mariela Paolucci, Hernán Pringe, Marcos Thisted: Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2017. 512 Seiten. ISBN 978-950-563-450-7.
- Gualtiero Lorini: Fonti e lessico dell’ontologia kantiana. I Corsi di Metafisica (1762-1795). Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2017. 270 p. ISBN 9788846747389.
- Sascha Salatowsky: Die Philosophie der Sozinianer. Transformationen zwischen Renaissance-Aristotelismus und Frühaufklärung. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2015. 519 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-7728-2675-7.
- Jeffrey Edwards: Autonomy, Moral Worth, and Right. Kant on Obligatory Ends, Respect for Law, and Original Acquisition. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018. 353 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-11-051606-7.
