Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Carsten Fogh Nielsen
Department of Culture and Society/Department of Education
Aarhus University
I Introduction
Within the last 20-25 years the impure parts of Kant’s philosophy, his anthropology, his views on
history, on education and on (moral) psychology have come to be viewed as far more important
for a proper understanding of Kant’s moral theory than at any other time in the history of postKantian philosophy. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly the publication of a number of
student lecture notes from Kant’s lectures on anthropology in volume 25 of the Akademie
Ausgabe in 1998, combined with the excellent new translations of Kant’s writings (including parts
of the student lecture notes on anthropology) in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel
Kant. Another (and from a purely philosophical perspective perhaps more interesting) reason for
this development, is that closer attention to Kant’s analysis of the impure, empirical aspects of
human existence reveals a view of human nature which is much more subtle, interesting and
plausible than what critics of Kant commonly seem to scribe to him.1
Part of this general movement towards a more complex engagement with and appreciation of the
resources inherent in Kant’s philosophy has been a growing interest in what we might term the
phenomenological aspects of Kant’s moral philosophy. A number of Kantian scholars (and other
philosophers interested in the development of modern moral philosophy) have begun to look at
Kant’s account of how morality, moral demands, and moral obligations present themselves to and
establish themselves within the lives of human beings in a far more positive and constructive light
than used to be the case in (much) 20th century moral philosophy. One might say that the moral
phenomenology implicit in Kant’s moral philosophy have become less of an obstacle for
understanding and appreciating Kant’s moral theory than before, and have instead become an
interesting and important object of study for those of us interested in explicating (and perhaps
even defending) a Kantian approach to moral theory.
This paper is a contribution to this gradual shift towards a more attentive, complex and
appreciative view of the relevance, importance and plausibility of Kant’s views on and account of
the phenomenology of moral experience. The paper has three parts. In Section One I introduce the
current discussion of “Kant’s moral phenomenology” via a brief overview of the recent debate
between Anne Margaret Baxley and Robert Stern concerning (the importance of) Kant’s distinction
between the holy will and the human will for solving the problem moral obligation. In Section Two
1
See e.g. Anscombe 1958; MacIntyre 1985, ch. 4 & 5; Murdoch 2003, particularly the chapter on ”The Sovereignty of
Good Over Other Concepts”; Stocker 1976, 1996 and Williams 1976, 1981 and 1993 ch. 10.
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
I then raise a number of critical questions concerning how to best make sense of notion of “moral
phenomenology” within the confines of Kant’s philosophy. More precisely I will argue that one
particular understanding of what a “Kantian moral phenomenology” might be is implausible and
should be rejected if we want to stay true to Kant’s basic theoretical framework. In the third and
final section I then briefly point out where I believe further developments of a “Kantian moral
phenomenology” can and should begin. Whether such preliminary handwaving amounts to a
proper conclusion or whether it simply indicates this speakers’ inability to structure his paper
properly I will let the audience decide.
II Baxley and Stern on Kant and the phenomenology of moral obligation
In her contribution to the Symposium on Robert Stern’s Understanding Moral Obligation. Kant,
Hegel, Kierkegaard in Inquiry (55:6) 2012 Anne Margaret Baxley distinguishes between:
…two separate questions that arise when we are concerned to account for the
obligatory nature of morality:
1) What accounts for the fact that moral laws are obligatory or binding for all
rational agents independent of any contingent facts about their particular
empirical feelings, desires, and interests?
2) What accounts for the fact that moral laws take the form of obligations or
duties for merely finite rational agents, no matter how morally good they are or
become?
Baxley 2012, p. 571
The first question concerns the normativity of moral obligation: “the authority of morality” as
Baxley terms it. Why and by what right does morality have the authority to issue categorical
requirements, which are binding for all rational agents? The second question concerns the
phenomenology of moral obligation. As Baxley puts it, it is the question of why “we experience
moral laws as imperatival commands, commands that always take the form of duties, where duty
entails some feeling of constraint or necessitation of the will by pure practical reason?” (Baxley
2012, p. 571).
Let us focus on the phenomenological question here. How does Kant account for the experience of
being morally obligated? The official answer proposed by Stern in his book, and (for the sake of
argument at least) accepted by Baxley in her reply to Stern, is to be found at the crucial passage at
the beginning of Groundwork II, where Kant first introduces the notion of an imperative. Though
you probably all know this passage it is worth quoting (almost) in full:
… if reason solely by itself does not adequately determine the will; if the will is exposed
[unterworfen] also to subjective conditions (certain incentives) that are not always in
accord with the objective ones; in a word, if the will is not in itself completely in
conformity with reason (as is actually the case with human beings), the actions that are
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
cognized as objectively necessary are subjectively contingent, and the determination
of such a will in conformity with objective laws is necessitation [nötigung]: that is to
say, the relation of objective laws to a will that is not thoroughly good is represented
as the determination of the will of a rational being through grounds of reason indeed,
but grounds to which this will is not by its nature necessarily obedient.
The representation of an objective principle, in so far as it is necessitating for a will, is
called a command (of reason), and the formula of the command is called an
imperative. All imperatives are expressed by an ought [ein Sollen] and indicate by this
the relation of an objective law of reason to a will that by its subjective constitution is
not necessarily determined by it (a necessitation).
G 4:412-413
Kant presents a succinct summary of this line of thought a few paragraphs further on, where he
introduces the distinction between the human will and the holy will:
A perfectly good will would therefore, equally stand under objective laws of the good,
but it could not on this account be represented as necessitated to actions in
conformity with law since of itself, by its subjective constitution, it can be determined
only through the representation of the good. Hence no imperatives hold for the divine
will and in general for the holy will: the “ought” is out of place here, because volition is
of itself necessarily in accordance with the law. Therefore imperatives are only
formulae expressing the relation of objective laws of volition in general to the
subjective imperfection of the will of this or that rational being, for example, of the
human will.
G 4:414
There are many things going on in these passages, but the basic idea seems clear enough: Moral
laws derive from pure practical reason and thus necessarily and unconditionally apply to all
rational creatures. Perfectly rational creatures, creatures without a sensuous nature, have no
empirical inclinations that might conceivably conflict with the laws of morality and therefore
always and necessarily act in accordance with the laws issued by pure practical reason. By
definition a perfectly rational creature cannot be motivated by anything but practical reason. And
because of this the will of such a perfectly rational creature, what Kant terms a holy will, never
experiences the requirements of morality as constraints or limitations.
Imperfectly rational creature on the other hand, creatures such as human beings, endowed with
both reason and a sensuous nature, do not always and necessarily act in accordance with moral
laws. Our empirical inclinations can (and in many cases in fact will), conflict with the laws issued by
pure practical reason. To such creatures moral laws therefore manifest themselves as constraints,
as commands, as imperatives!2 Finite rational creatures experience the objective laws issued by
2
As Baxley notes: ” Kant insists that even the fully virtuous person, the person who has mastered her feelings and
inclinations and has cultivated the moral strength of will to overcome obstacles provided by her feelings and
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
pure practical reason as practical necessitation, as an unconditional “ought” which subjectively
constrain what they may legitimately do in pursuit of their empirical inclinations.
One can find passages similar to the ones quoted above scattered throughout Kant’s writings. In
the Critique of Practical Reason for instance, Kant explains that:
[The moral law is] not limited to human beings only but applies to all finite beings that
have reason and will and even includes the infinite being as the supreme intelligence.
In the first case, however, the law has the form of an imperative, because in them, as
rational beings, one can presuppose a pure will but, insofar as they are beings affected
by needs and sensible motives, not a holy will, that is, such a will as would not be
capable of any maxim conflicting with the moral law. Accordingly the law is for them
an imperative that commands categorically because the law is unconditional; the
relation of such a will to this law is dependence under the name of obligation
[verbindlichkeit], which signifies a necessitation [nötigung], though only by reason and
its objective law, to an action that is called duty [Pflicht]…
KpV 5:32
In the introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, in the section entitled “Preliminary Concepts of
the Metaphysics of Morals (Philosophia Practica Universalis)” we find the following passage:
Obligation is the necessity of a free action under a categorical imperative of reason.
An imperative is a practical rule by which an action in itself contingent is made
necessary. An imperative differs from a practical law in that a law indeed represents an
action as necessary but takes no account of whether this action already inheres by an
inner necessity in the acting subject (as in a holy being) or whether it is contingent (as
in the human being); for where the former is the case there is no imperative. Hence an
imperative is a rule the representation of which makes necessary an action that is
subjectively contingent and thus represents the subject as one that must be
constrained (necessitated [genötigt]) to conform to the rule.
MdS 6:222
And later on in the Metaphysics of Morals, in the “Introduction to the doctrine of virtue”, Kant
explains that:
The very concept of duty is already the concept of necessitation (constraint) of free
choice through the law. This constraint may be an external constraint or a selfconstraint. The moral imperative makes this constraint known through the categorical
nature of its pronouncement (the unconditional ought). Such constraint, therefore,
does not apply to rational beings as such (there could also be holy ones) but rather to
human beings, rational natural beings, who are unholy enough that pleasure can
induce them to break the moral law, even though they recognize its authority; and
inclinations and to do her duty from duty, is never completely beyond the possibility of acting on temptation.” (Baxley
2012, p. 570)
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
even when they obey the law they do it reluctantly (in the face of opposition from
their inclinations) and it is in this that such constraint properly consists.
MdS 6:379
Now, Baxley believes that the distinction between the human will and the holy will, which Kant
draws in Groundwork II and elucidates in his subsequent ethical writings, is primarily intended as
an answer to the phenomenological question: the question of why “we experience moral laws as
imperatival commands […that] entails some feeling of constraint or necessitation of the will by
pure practical reason”. And the picture does seem pretty clear, particularly if we include the
paragraphs from the Critique of practical Reason and the Metaphysics of Morals which I quoted
above: Kant takes human beings to be imperfectly rational creatures; beings who, though they are
endowed with reason also have a sensuous, empirical nature, which is a source of motivations and
inclinations that do not necessarily accord with the laws issued by pure practical reason. For this
reason moral laws impress themselves upon human beings as imperatives, as rational constraints
on the (legitimate) pursuit of satisfaction of empirical inclinations. Perfectly rational creatures on
the other hand, holy beings, beings with a holy will, never experiences the moral law as constraint,
because they have no sensuous nature which could give rise to motivations that subvert or
contradict this law.
What about the other question concerning moral obligation; the question of the normativity of
morality? Here Baxley is very clear: In and of itself the human will/holy will distinction does not
solve this problem: “the distinction does not resolve the fundamental issue about the
obligatoriness of morality, for this requires providing an […] account of the authority of moral
laws, one explaining how being obligated by unconditional practical laws does not result in
heteronomy of will.” (Baxley 2012, p. 571).
This is where Baxley takes issue with Stern’s interpretation of Kant in the first part of
Understanding Moral Obligation. Baxley believes that Stern illegitimately conflates the question of
phenomenology and the question of normativity, and thus misrepresents Kant’s views. More
precisely, she believes that Stern takes Kant’s account of the phenomenology of moral obligation
in Groundwork II, to also provide an answer (or at least “a crucial part of the answer” (Stern 2012a,
p. 80)) to the question of the normativity of moral obligation, which is the primary topic of
Groundwork III. In Baxley’s opinion, however, this is a mistake. Kant never intended his analysis of
the experience of a categorical moral demand in Groundwork II to provide an answer to the
question of “How such a synthetic practical proposition is possible a priori and why it is
necessary”, which he takes up in Groundwork III. In short: Baxley (and if she is right Kant) believes
that the question concerning the phenomenology of moral obligation is distinct from the question
of the normativity of such obligations, and that the answer to the first of these questions cannot
also provide an answer to the second question. We need an answer to both of these questions in
order to properly account for moral obligation, but the answer cannot be one and the same.
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
Let us now turn to Sterns reply to Baxley. Stern quite clearly agrees with Baxley that there is an
important distinction between the phenomenology and the normativity of moral obligation, and
that we thus need to provide an account for both aspects of the problem of moral obligation.
However, Stern also insists that these two aspects of the problem are intimately and importantly
related.
Now of course, I certainly do think that there is a phenomenological aspect to the
problem of moral obligation, and this was one side of the issue I was keen to bring out
[in my discussion of Kant]. But as I tried to make clear when discussing the problem of
moral obligation generally […] I take seriously other aspects of the problem too, where
these two go hand-in-hand: in feeling constrained, we hereby take it that a legitimate
authority is being exercised over us, as otherwise we would dismiss the feeling as
merely pathological.
Stern 2012b, p. 624
According to Stern the phenomenology of moral obligation, the experience of being categorically
constrained or necessitated, provides an important and crucial epistemic gateway to the
normativity question, because the experience of being morally obligated, naturally, perhaps
inevitably, gives rise to the question of normativity. To feel oneself constrained by moral
requirements is take oneself to be constrained by (what we regard as) a legitimate authority.
Being morally obligated, being categorically necessitated by moral demands, is different from
being illegitimately forced to do or believe something. Even though we might not always be
immediately disposed to conform to the demands of morality we still accept these demands as
legitimate, as being commanded or authorized by a legitimate authority. Otherwise the feeling of
being constrained would be nothing but a pathological, and hence non-normative, empirical
inclination. But that immediately raises the question of the normative authority of morality, of
what legitimizes the requirements issued by morality and differentiates these requirements from
e.g. the requirements of self-love or prudence?
Stern believes that Kant also took this view. Or more precisely formulated: Stern believes that
Kant’s account of the phenomenology of moral obligation provides an indispensable epistemic
starting point for Kant’s analysis of the normative authority of morality:
In fact, I would argue, the very question of authority depends on it. For, just as the holy
will could not undergo the experience of moral necessitation, so it could not raise the
worry of whether it should accept the authority of moral reason over its non-moral
interests, as it has no such interests; thus in this sense its moral reason exercises no
such authority, as there is nothing over which it stands in any authority, as the
hierarchical relation this requires does not here apply. Just raising the issue for Kant,
therefore, already relies on the distinction.
Stern 2012b, p. 624
The very fact that the question concerning the authority and legitimacy of moral obligation arises
for human beings depends on the distinction between the human will and the holy will. A holy will
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
never experiences moral necessitation, because a holy will as a matter of fact always wills in
accordance with the moral law. For that reason the question of the authority of the moral law
never arises as a problem for a holy will. In fact there is no problem for the holy will, because there
are no opposing inclinations for the moral law to exercise authority over. For the human will on
the other hand the normativity of moral obligation is a problem, a problem which arises precisely
because of the moral experience of being categorically necessitated. Because what legitimizes this
necessitation? What authorizes pure practical reason to issue categorical commands to the human
will? And how can such categorical commands be reconciled with the freedom and autonomy of
the human will? (This latter question is one of the starting points and underlying themes of Stern’s
discussion of Kant in Understanding Moral Obligation).
Stern thus believes that “the holy/human will distinction can do more work than Baxley allows”
(Stern 2012b, p. 626). In particular he believes that this distinction not only explains the
phenomenology of being morally obligated, but also provides a (necessary) epistemic starting
point for Kant’s analysis of the authority of moral obligation. In fact, Stern goes even farther and
argues (both in his book and in his reply to Baxley), that this distinction does provide us with at
least part of the answer to the question of normative authority. Briefly put Stern believes that this
distinction allows us to see “that because what binds us is our rational nature in compelling us to
follow the moral law, we can see how it comes to be authoritative for us, as in conforming to such
authority, we are hereby following our higher selves…” (Stern 2012b, p. 626). This in no way
amounts to a full solution to the problem of the authority of morality (for one thing we still need
to explain how and to what extent the sort of practical freedom required by Kant’s conception of
pure practical reason can be reconciled with the causal determinism implied by his analysis of
theoretical reason), but it does at least point us in the right direction.
II Kant and moral phenomenology – a second look
Even this brief overview of the debate between Baxley and Stern should have made clear that
much of their disagreement revolves around the question of how to best account for the role of
the holy will/human will distinction in Kant’s moral philosophy as a whole. Is this distinction
primarily intended as an answer to the question of the phenomenology of moral obligation? Or
does it also have an important role to play in Kant’s attempt to answer the question of the
normative authority of morality? Both Baxley and Stern accepts that there is a difference between
Kant’s account of the phenomenology and his account of the normativity of moral obligation;
between the experience of being morally obligated and the question of the normative authority of
the moral law. Where they differ is in their view on the relation between these two accounts.
Baxley believes that Kant’s distinction between the holy will and the human will has no bearing on
the question of normativity, but only on the question of phenomenology. Stern on the other hand
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
believes that this distinction also provides some insight into Kant’s solution to the problem of the
normativity of moral obligation.
At this point it might be prudent to back up a little and reflect a bit on the underlying similarities
between Baxley’s and Stern’s account, in particular the way in which Kant’s distinction between
the holy will/human will figures in the discussion. Both Stern and Baxley accept (for the sake of
argument perhaps, but nonetheless accept) that this distinction provides an (plausible?)
explanation of a particular moral phenomenon: the experience of categorical necessitation
intrinsic to the notion of morally obligation. What is at stake is thus not the basic structure of the
holy will/human will distinction, nor whether this distinction provides Kant with a plausible
phenomenological account of the experience of being morally obligated. They both agree on that.
No, the crucial difference between Baxley and Stern, and the heart of their disagreement, is rather
the implications of this account for the rest of Kant’s philosophy.
One obvious question to raise here is whether the “phenomenological interpretation” of the holy
will/human will distinction adopted by both Baxley and Stern is in fact the best and most
convincing way of interpreting what Kant is up to in the passages quoted above. More precisely: Is
it really true that the holy will/human will distinction is primarily (perhaps even exclusively)
intended as an explanation of the phenomenological experience of being morally obligated? Up
until now we have simple assumed, along with Baxley and Stern, that it was. But is this assumption
warranted? Perhaps not. It all depends upon how we understand the terms “experience” and
“phenomenological”.
We can begin by noting that when we talk about “moral experience”, “moral phenomenology”
and “the experience of being morally obligated” in connection with Kant we cannot in any
straightforward way be talking about ordinary, everyday, empirical experiences, about actual firstpersonal psychological feelings.
First and most obviously: However we should understand “the experience of being morally
obligated” there is one thing which, at least within Kant’s philosophy, clearly distinguishes this
experience from all other sorts of experiences, namely that the “cause” of this experience is a nonempirical object: the moral law. This simple fact raises all kinds of problems concerning not only
how we are to understand the influence of this object on human sensibility, but also concerning
the sort of epistemic and cognitive access it is possible for finite, discursive beings like us to have
to this kind of object. In her recent book Kant’s Defense of Common Moral Experience. A
Phenomenological Account (CUP, 2013) Jeanine Grenberg dedicates a whole chapter and many
subsequent sub-sections to a discussion of precisely these questions, so I will not go into any
detailed discussion here, just note that there is a problem here that needs to be dealt with.
Secondly, and more directly related to Baxley’s and Stern’s discussion: when Kant first introduces
the concept of an imperative as well as the holy will/human will distinction in Groundwork II, he
does so immediately after having famously rejected any and all empirical grounding of morality
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
and dismissed the popular moral philosophy of his time as a “disgusting hodgepodge of patchwork
observations and half-rationalized principles, in which shallow pates revel because it is something
useful for everyday chit-chat…” (G 4:409). Summing up his own position Kant explains that:
From what has been said it is clear that all moral concepts have their seat and origin
completely a priori in reason, and indeed in the most common reason just as in reason
that is speculative in the highest degree; that they cannot be abstracted from any
empirical and therefore merely contingent cognitions; that just in this purity of their
origin lies their dignity, so that they can serve us as supreme practical principles; that
in adding anything empirical to them one subtracts just as much from their genuine
influence and from the unlimited worth of actions; that it is not only a requirement of
the greatest necessity for theoretical purposes when it is a matter merely of
speculation, but also of the greatest practical importance to draw its concepts and
laws from pure reason, to set them forth pure and unmixed, and indeed to determine
the extent of this entire practical or pure rational cognition, that is, to determine the
extent of the entire faculty of pure practical reason; and in so doing, it is of the
greatest practical importance not to make its principles dependent upon the special
nature of human reason…
G 4:411-412
With this passage in mind it would seem that any sensible interpretation of “necessitation”,
“imperative” and the holy will/human will distinction, which Kant goes on to introduce on the very
next pages of the Groundwork, would do well to not define these terms as purely (or even
primarily) empirical phenomena. Even if one follows Baxley and Stern in their claim that these
concepts are not primarily intended to “ground” the normativity of moral obligation, but rather to
elucidate the phenomenology of being morally obligated it still seems doubtful whether Kant
believed the phenomena to be elucidated to be purely (or primarily) empirical.
What about the other passages quoted above in which Kant mentions the holy will/human will
distinction? Well, the two passages from the Metaphysics of Morals are both lifted from
introductory sections of this work in which Kant attempts to outline the overall conceptual
structure of his moral philosophy. As such these passages cannot in any straightforward way be
interpreted as referring to purely empirical phenomena. The same goes for the passage from the
Critique of Practical Reason. The easiest way to see this is to simply remember that this passage is
part of the “Doctrine of the elements of pure practical reason”. More precisely it is from a remark
in Book One: The Analytic of Pure Practical Reason; Chapter One: On the Principles of Pure Practical
Reason; Section 7: Fundamental Law of Pure Practical Reason. In short: Pure practical reason all
the way through!
Thirdly: If we define the experience of being morally obligated as a (purely or primarily) empirical
phenomena, then we potentially widen the gap between the phenomena we want to explain and
Kant’s proposed explanation so much that their relationship become far more tenuous and
questionable than we might like. Consider for instance Bernard Williams’ critique of the concept of
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
moral obligation in the last chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Contrary to what one
might expect Williams here actually defends the view that human beings occasionally do reach
deliberative conclusions that counts as practically necessary, and that such conclusions give rise to
an experience of being faced “with a “must” that is unconditional and goes all the way down.”
(Williams 1993, p. 188).3 Furthermore, Williams also believes that Kant explicitly attempts to
account for this experience by showing how the transcendental moral law gives rise to an
empirical feeling. Here is Williams’ take on Kant’s solution:
Kant also describes the conclusion of practical necessity, understood as peculiar to
morality, as recognition of the demands of moral law, and when he speaks of this in
psychological terms, he refer to a special feeling or sentiment, a “sense of reverence
for the law.” […] Kant did not think that the compelling sense of moral necessity,
regarded as a feeling, was itself what provided the reason for moral action. As a
feeling, it was just a feeling and had no more rational power than any other merely
psychological item had. The reason lay not in what the feeling was, but in what it
represented, the truth that moral universality was a requirement of practical reason
itself. That truth, as Kant took it to be, meant that morality had an objective
foundation […] and he took the experience of moral demand to represent this
foundation.
Williams 1993, p. 190
Leaving aside the details of William’s interpretation of Kant, there are two things which are
important to note here. First Williams distinguishes sharply between one the one hand the
demands of the “transcendental” moral law, and on the other hand the psychological, empirical
impact that these demands have on human beings; the feeling of moral necessity invoked by the
moral law. Based on this distinction Williams then, secondly (and quite correctly) points out that
for Kant “the compelling sense of moral necessity, regarded as a feeling” cannot be what grounds
the normativity of moral obligation. No, the normativity of pure practical reason, the “reason for
moral action” must reside somewhere else; namely in the “the truth that moral universality was a
requirement of practical reason”.
Why is this important? It is important because it enables Williams to claim that such a sharp
distinction between “the experience of moral demand” and the question concerning the
normativity of these demands is implausible because (among other things) such a distinction
inevitably leads us to misrepresent or misunderstand the nature of practical normativity. This,
Williams believes, was even acknowledged by Kant, who (still according to Williams) himself
regarded the experience of being morally obligated as inherently problematic and misleading:
The experience is like being confronted with something, a law that is part of the world
in which one lives. Yet the power of the moral law, according to Kant, does not lie and
could not possible lie in anything outside oneself. Its power lies in its objective
3
Williams’ notion of “unconditioned” obviously differs hugely from Kant’s but we will leave that to one side for the
moment. See Williams’s 1993 p. 189 for Williams’ own take on the differences.
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
foundation and no experience could adequately represent that kind of objectivity. […]
But then what is it for a consideration to present itself as an objective demand? […] It
must have some […] psychological form, and the form will be, to that extent,
misleading.
Williams 1993, p. 190
The obvious solution to this problem, according to Williams, is to simply give up the attempt to
derive our phenomenological experience of practical necessity from a transcendental moral law,
since this attempt leads us to misinterpret and misrepresent this experience.
Once we have ceased to believe in Kant’s own foundation, or anything like it, we
cannot read this experience in this way at all. It is the conclusion of practical necessity,
no more no less, and it seems to “come from the outside” in the way that conclusions
of practical necessity always seem to come from outside – from deeply inside. […]
When we know that the recognition of obligation is, if we still make it the special
center of ethical experience, we are building ethical life around an illusion. Even in
Kant’s own view, this experience involves a misrepresentation, but it is a necessary and
acceptable one, a consequence of transposing objectivity from the transcendental
level to the psychological. But if this experience is special only in the psychological
mode, then it is worse than a misrepresentation: there is nothing (or nothing special)
for it to represent.
Williams 1993, p. 191.
For Williams the categorical Kantian distinction between moral experience and moral normativity
implies that no “phenomenological meaning” would be lost by adopting a more empirical and
psychological account of the experience of practical necessity. In fact, dropping the transcendental
story might even enable us to develop a better, more adequate and satisfying phenomenological
account of moral experience than the one presented by Kant. Williams thus concludes that not
only can we drop Kant’s attempt to provide a transcendental explanation for the “sense of moral
necessity”; we should give up on this attempt altogether.
The reason for this short venture into the difficult and unpredictable terrain that is the philosophy
of Bernard Williams has been to show what happens (or at least what can happen) if the
“experience of moral necessity” is construed as a purely empirical or psychological phenomenon.
From a Kantian perspective such a construal would make the moral experience completely nonnormative; the sense of practical necessity would be simply one more psychological item in our
cabinet of empirical mental states, with no more right to provide normative guidance than any
other inclination. The normative and the phenomenological aspects of moral obligation would
correlate, but there would be no way to legitimately and intelligibly move from moral experience
to moral normativity (or from moral normativity to moral experience for that matter). And if that
is the case, then Williams’ suggestion, that we simply do away with any attempt to provide a
transcendental grounding for the experience of practical necessity, might seem quite reasonable.
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
All of which brings us back to the questions raised at the beginning of this section: How are we to
understand notions such as “moral experience” and “moral phenomenology” within the
framework of Kant’s moral philosophy? What I have been arguing so far is that one particular way
of making sense of these terms, namely as referring to ordinary empirical experience, to a feeling
of practically necessity understood in ordinary psychological terms (whatever that might mean),
seems highly implausible. Not only would such an interpretation go against the grain of most of
Kant’s moral philosophy; it would also imply a radical and problematic separation of the
phenomenology and the normativity of moral obligation. If we want to continue talking about
“moral experience” and “moral phenomenology” in relation to Kant’s philosophy, we thus need to
find other and better ways of understanding and employing these terms.
III Rounding off
To develop a plausible and distinctively Kantian phenomenology of moral experience is obviously a
much too ambitious project to undertake here. In the remainder of this paper I will instead briefly
point towards some possible (and interesting) ways to proceed with such a project.
First let us return to Baxley’s and Stern’s discussion of the holy will/human will distinction and the
phenomenology of moral obligation. As argued above we should not interpret the holy will/human
will distinction as an attempt to account for the empirical feeling of practical necessity, at least not
in any straightforward way. How then are we to understand this distinction?
Baxley herself provides an answer to this question in her 2010 book Kant's Theory of Virtue: The
Value of Autocracy. Baxley here develops a take on Kant’s account of how and why moral agents
experience the demands of morality as imperatives, as categorical limitations on the demands of
our sensible nature, which she herself takes to be an alternative to a more “phenomenological”
interpretation. Briefly put Baxley believes that Kant’s point in making these distinctions is primarily
metaphysical (perhaps conceptual?), not phenomenological or experiential. In her own words:
Kant’s position that finite rational agents necessarily experience moral laws as
obligations entailing constraint by the concept of duty is not intended as a
phenomenological point about how acting from duty actually feels from the firstperson perspective at the time of action, though we should readily concede that at
times Kant suggests as much […] Instead, on the alternative interpretation suggested
here, the thesis that as human beings we obey the moral law reluctantly (ungern) is
better understood as a metaphysical point about our status as finite imperfect
creatures for whom it is at least possible to act in contrary-to-duty ways, no matter
how virtuous or autocratic we have become.
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
Baxley 2010, p. 1124
Given Baxley’s apparent acceptance of some sort of phenomenological interpretation of the holy
will/human will distinction in her discussion with Stern these remarks might at first glance seem
rather strange. Isn’t Baxley contradicting herself? Not necessarily. I take it that what Baxley is
objecting to in the passage just quoted is not the very possibility of interpreting e.g. the holy
will/human will distinction as an account of (part of) the phenomenology of moral experience.
What she is rejecting is rather a particular way of understanding the relevant sort of moral
experience. The object of a Kantian moral phenomenology cannot simply be “how acting from
duty actually feels from the first-person perspective at the time of action”. To investigate that
particular psychological phenomenon would be a job for empirical moral psychology, not
something which a proper Kantian account of the phenomenology of moral obligation would be
particularly interested in.
What then would a proper Kantian moral phenomenology be interested in, and what would such a
phenomenology look like? Once again: These are big questions, and I cannot hope to provide an
adequate answer here. But let me point in what I take to be the right direction. Very briefly put:
The object of Kantian moral phenomenology is not empirical moral psychology, i.e. purely
empirical, psychological feelings, emptions or experiences. No, Kantian moral psychology aims to
analyze and account for the way in which the moral law, the unconditional and non-empirical
ground of moral obligation, influences human sensibility and manifests itself in human experience.
As such Kantian moral phenomenology cannot directly contribute to answering the question of
why pure practical reason exercises legitimate authority over the human will (the question
concerning the normativity of morality). But Kantian moral phenomenology can help us answer
the question of how the demands of morality present themselves to human beings, and why they
take the form they do, and thus provide a framework within which moral experience (the
sensuous aspect of human receptivity to categorical demands) as such can be analyzed and
explained.
The most systematic, comprehensive and ambitious recent attempt to develop such a distinctive
and distinctively Kantian account of moral phenomenology is Jeanine Grenbergs recent book
Kant’s Defense of Common Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Account from 2013. In this
book Grenberg goes well beyond anything either Baxley or Stern (or me for that matter) would
probably commit themselves to. Grenberg basically tries to show two things: 1) that one can find a
sophisticated and interesting phenomenological approach to and account of moral experience in
Kant’s writings, and 2) that Kant employs this phenomenological approach to not only explicate
the experience of being categorically bound by an unconditional moral law but also to (at least
4
Baxley is here discussing passages in the so-called “Vigilantius lecture notes”, where Kant comments on Schiller’s
critique of the Kantian distinction between empirical inclinations and pure practical reason. However, Baxley’s
comments seem to reflect her considered opinion of Kant’s philosophy as a whole as developed through her book.
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
partly) explain and justify the normativity of morality. As Grenberg explains in the introduction to
her book:
…in this phenomenological approach to common moral experience, feeling – as the
proper object of our attentive reflection – plays a particularly important enabling
epistemic role in Kant’s moral philosophy, a role not adequately appreciated by
current interpreters of his work. […] we will affirm that the limits of reason demand of
us that we put our active and rational deliberation on hold so as to first be truly
receptive to what is present in our felt moral consciousness. Only in so doing will Kant,
and Kantians, be able to appreciate deep metaphysical truths about one’s rational self
that are otherwise inaccessible to merely sensibly affected rational beings.
Grenberg 2013, p. 10
I am not entirely convinced by the overall shape of Greenberg’s project, and I strongly disagree
with many of her concrete analyses and conclusions. But I do think that she manages to
convincingly carve out the conceptual space needed to develop a plausible and important
conception of moral phenomenology within Kant’s philosophy. She does so by analyzing Kant’s
conceptions of experience and feeling and showing that Kant has the conceptual resources to
develop an account of “objective, synthetic, a priori practical cognitions” which (at least partly)
traverses the divide between theoretical cognition of empirical reality and
the
incomprehensibility of the supersensible realm of (transcendental) freedom.
There is, I believe, much to learn from Greenberg’s book, and, perhaps equally important, much to
criticize, and her project of developing a plausible and interesting conception of a Kantian moral
phenomenology is both important and worth pursuing further. That, however, is a task for
another time. Let me end this presentation with a quote from Kant, from the Critique of Practical
Reason:
I ask […] from what our cognition of the unconditionally practical starts, whether from
freedom or from the practical law. It cannot start from freedom, for we can neither be
immediately conscious of this, since the first concept of it is negative, nor can we
conclude to it from experience, since experience lets us cognize only the law of
appearances and hence the mechanism of nature, the direct opposite of freedom. It is
therefore the moral law, of which we first become immediately conscious (as soon as
we draw up maxims of the will for us ourselves), that first offers itself to us… […] But
how is consciousness of that moral law possible?
KpV 5:29-30
How is consciousness of the moral law possible? How does the moral law initially present itself to
us? How do we become aware of ourselves as morally obligated? These are the questions from
which a Kantian moral phenomenology must begin, and which such a phenomenology must
attempt to answer. They are also the place where I have decided to end my talk. So thank you very
much for listening.
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
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Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Paper presented at the conference Moral Obligation, University of Aarhus, May 20-21, 2014
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